Decade Long Forrest Fenn Treasure Hunt Finally Ends

The search for "Fenn's Gold" was a decade-long treasure hunt marred by tragedy that may or may not have been a wild goose chase all along. It’s got all the makings of a classic Indiana Jones tale: an epic riddle, an enigmatic storyteller, a string of missing persons, and a bronze chest packed to the brim with booty which has now been found.

Who Is Forrest Fenn?

It all begins with this guy: Forrest Fenn. Back in the day, now 89-year-old Fenn was a pilot in the United States Air Force. He reached the rank of Major and was even awarded the prestigious Silver Star medal for his service in the Vietnam War, where he flew 328 combat missions in 365 days.

After retiring in 1970, Fenn set up the Arrowsmith-Fenn Gallery with his business partner Rex Arrowsmith, later becoming the Fenn Galleries, which was run by Fenn and his wife, Peggy. The gallery is located in Santa Fe, New Mexico and sells a bunch of mostly American Indian artefacts: paintings, bronze sculptures, and other Western curios. You name it, they got it.

The new business really took off, and by the early ‘80’s it was reported that the gallery was already grossing $6million a year. Celebrities and politicians from Robert Redford to Cher and Steve Martin travelled to Santa Fe to peruse and purchase his one-of-a-kind exotic goods. Forrest Fenn’s fortune was growing, and it was growing fast.

Then, tragedy struck. In 1988, when Fenn was 58-years-old, he received the news no one wants to hear: he had kidney cancer, and it was terminal. According to the doctors, he had around a 20% chance of surviving the next three years. Chemo was tough going, a surgery to remove the cancer had already failed and life was looking pretty bleak.

What do you do when you’re an eccentric millionaire whose days are suddenly numbered? Hatch a swashbuckling plan to hide your riches in your favorite spot, swallow a bottle of sleeping pills at said spot and leave behind a string of clues for would-be treasure hunters the world over to search for! Except, that’s not exactly what happened.

Over the next several months, then years, Fen slowly grew stronger until, in 1993, he had miraculously beaten the cancer altogether. That’s cause for celebration, right? Fenn knew that he didn’t need to follow through on his “last hurrah” after all. But he never forgot about his plan, and in 2010, decades after it was first hatched, he decided to finally do something about it.

Fenn Treasure

Fenn’s brush with death had given him a renewed sense of appreciation for the great outdoors, and he saw the hunt as a way to entice the technology-obsessed younger generation back into the wilderness. His original hope, back in 1988, was also that the promise of buried treasure would inspire people at a time when the world was facing a recession.

So, he got hold of a 10-by-10 inch ornate bronze chest dating back to the 12th century and filled it with wonders beyond your wildest dreams. The cache of riches included emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and gold bullions he’d collected over the years, as well as two gold nuggets “the size of hens eggs” and an old Navajo bracelet with 22 prehistoric turquoise disc beds inlaid in silver.

Then, one afternoon, he put the chest in the trunk of his Sedan and made two trips of an unknown distance into the Rocky Mountains to stash the bounty away in a spot close to his heart. First, he lugged the chest, which apparently weighs some 20lb alone, to the hiding spot, then returned to fill it with the loot amounting to a further 22lb.

Next, he penned a cryptic 24-line poem which apparently contained all the clues needed to locate the treasure, which he self-published in the fall of 2010 in a chapter titled Gold and More from his memoir The Thrill of the Chase. At last the stage was set, and the hunt was officially on. And boy, did it begin.

Fenn claims that a day after the world caught wind of the hunt, he received over 12,000 emails, crashing his computer. News coverage came thick and fast, with Fenn’s face appearing anywhere from local papers in the Southwest to national TV broadcasts. In the years since, an estimated 350,000 people from all over the world have joined the search, many quitting their jobs and depleting their life savings to fund their new-found hobby.

At the same time, YouTube shows, online forums, documentaries and even an entire subreddit popped up online with the sole purpose of unravelling the mystery and obtaining the bragging rights about being the one to finally find Fenn’s Gold. What began as one old man’s dying wish to get people off the couch and onto their feet had turned into an overnight phenomenon with the eccentric art dealer as the proverbial Willy Wonka.

Considering the contents of the chest alone have been valued at anywhere between $1-5million, it’s really no surprise that people went crazy over the opportunity to get their hands on it first. Fenn said himself that there’s no reason for people to use the internet or social media to find the treasure. In fact, the only tools the hunters would need are their own instincts and, of course, the poem which supposedly contains 9 key clues:

The biggest clue regarding the whereabouts of the elusive treasure is probably that the guy was 79-years-old when he hid it. You can’t see him lugging a 20lb bronze chest up a mountain or through some treacherous ravine.

Then again, the only additional detail Fenn has ever let slip is that the treasure is hidden at least 8.25 miles north of Santa Fe at an elevation of 5,000feet. Either way, the poem is open to interpretation, and intrepid explorers have translated various parts to correspond with landmarks across four states: Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, and Wyoming.

The whole thing is pretty vague and doesn’t give away anything specific, so people have put forward hundreds of ideas about what Fenn is actually saying in its 6 short stanzas. One of the most popular beliefs is that the fifth line, “begin it where the warm waters halt,” points hunters to a place where their search should begin.

The line is considered important because it’s the only couplet in the poem that doesn’t rhyme. Considering Fenn has stated that he agonized over the poem for some 15 years, it seems kind of fishy that he wouldn’t choose the word "balk" which could be interpreted to mean the basically same thing as "halt" while also conveniently rhyming with the word "walk" in the seventh line. Either that, or he just didn’t have a thesaurus to hand.

For many hunters, like retirees Dale Neitzel and Cynthia Meachum, who have dedicated years of their lives as well as thousands of dollars to the quest, “where the warm waters halt” can be interpreted as some kind of hot spring at the end of a stream or river, like the ones found in Yellowstone National park. This also happens to be a place Forrest spent many summers at as a kid, which has only fueled the fires of the theory.

According to Fenn, those who have successfully solved the first two clues have come within a couple of hundred feet of the treasure. Meanwhile, the line containing what is considered the final clue in the poem, “if you’ve been wise and found the blaze,” has often been interpreted to mean a "blaze" of white, like some large white rock that could be found sticking out of the Yellowstone area, as well as Colorado and New Mexico.

And yet, Dale and Cynthia, like hundreds of thousands of other hopeful explorers, were still yet to find themselves returning home with the reward in tow after following the so-called “clues”. There’s the problem of ownership to consider if the treasure was found in a national park or on privately-owned land. Besides, digging is illegal in Yellowstone National Park, which could also suggest that the chest was never actually buried and remains exposed to the elements.

The loot may be nigh-on impossible to locate, thanks to the endless possibilities woven into Fenn’s writing, but all this galivanting through the wilderness can do no harm, right? Wrong. The saying “It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt” has never been truer, and the search for Fenn’s gold has not been without its perils.

In January 2016, 54-year-old Colorado man Randy Bilyeu went missing while hunting for the treasure among the rugged canyons of northern New Mexico. What ensued was a 6-month search which concluded when Bilyeu’s body was tragically discovered by workers along the Rio Grande. Although an autopsy couldn’t confirm the exact cause of his death it was almost certainly caused by risks taken during his solo quest to uncover the gold. And he’s not the only one.

Since then, the death toll surrounding the Fenn Fortune has reached a grand total of 5. On June 9th, 2017, 53-year-old Jeff Murphy of Batavia, Illinois met an untimely end after falling about 500feet down a steep slope at Yellowstone park.

Then, when Pastor Paris Williams from Grand Junction, Colorado told family members he was searching for buried treasure but failed to show up to a function on June 14th, 2017, they also feared the worst. He too was later found 5-7miles downstream from his parked car along the Rio Grande. 31-year-old Eric Ashby met a similar fate while rafting at Colorado’s Arkansas River on July 28th, 2017 after moving to the area a year earlier to pursue the treasure.

Most recently on March 21st, 2020, 53-year-old Michael Sexton from Deer Trail Colorado was found dead by rescuers near the Dinosaur National Monument alongside the Utah-Colorado border. Whenever he’s been asked about whether he feels at all accountable for the potentially life-threatening wild goose chase he started all those years ago, Fenn himself has had little to stay on the matter.

Although Fenn had succeeded in his goal of getting people back into the wilderness, the fact that people were now losing their lives looking for something that may or may not even exist in the first place started to give the whole debacle a slightly bitter taste. In 2017, Pete Kassetas, the chief of the New Mexico State Police, publicly implored Forrest Fenn to call off the search stating that “he’s putting lives at risk”, but it seems the call was made to no avail.

People are searching for elusive treasure a multi-millionaire claims he hid by ABC News

And it wasn’t just the hunters who were at risk. Fenn has confessed to receiving online death threats from enraged searchers, while some have even turned up in his own back yard to dig for the chest. In December 2019, Fenn was also slapped with a hefty $1.5million lawsuit by Colorado man David Harold Hanson of Colorado Springs, who claims that Fenn provided him with "misleading clues" which derailed his successful search for the cache of riches. According to Hanson, the damages cost was based on half the publicized value of the contents of the chest, which is only fair.

Meanwhile, Randy Bilyeu’s ex-wife Linda openly stated that she believed Randy had lost his life while chasing what was essentially a hoax, because Fenn had provided such vague information about the treasure. And she wasn’t the only one. Soon, many had begun to speculate that Fenn never carried the treasure into the Rockies in the first place, but simply spun the whole tale as a way to gain publicity for his book.

A handful of people close to the eccentric antiques dealer, including friend and ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame, have come forward to defend him, by claiming that they had witnessed Fenn filling the chest with the treasure before making the trip to hide it back in 2010.

A hidden treasure in the American West by CBS Sunday Morning

Treasure Hunt Ends

Things were warming up, and as the months and years drew on it seemed more and more likely that the fabled treasure really was some sort of publicity stunt gone wrong. But then, when it was least expected, the internet caught wind of a major development in the tale: Fenn’s Gold had finally been found.

On June 6th, 2020, Forrest Fenn himself posted on the blog Thrill of the Chase to break the news. Although he didn’t reveal the specific whereabouts of the bounty, he wrote “It was under a canopy of stars in the lush, forested vegetation of the Rocky Mountains and had not moved from the spot where I hid it more than 10 years ago. I do not know the person who found it, but the poem in my book led him to the precise spot.”

Short, sweet, and vague as can be. He then went on to congratulate the thousands of people who had taken part in the quest, and concluded the message by saying “So, the search is over. Look for more information and photos in the coming days." That leaves a lot to be desired after an epic 10-year hunt that claimed several lives. And yet, unlucky hunters were left to celebrate, or commiserate, the end of an era while they basically twiddled their thumbs and awaited further updates.

Fenn then confirmed that the finder was a man from “back East” who had sent him a photograph of the chest. According to Fenn, he hadn’t communicated with the man since 2018, and the lucky finder had decided to keep his identity private.

Then, on June 16th Fenn released a set of photos on the Thrill of The Chase blog to “prove” that the treasure was no longer hidden. In one, we can see Fenn examining the contents of the chest, likely before filling it back in 2010, while another shows Fenn wearing the Navajo bracelet he mentioned placing inside.

The final photo shows the muddied chest itself sitting in a weathered condition implicitly on or near the site where it was found, piled high with gold coins and nuggets, various unidentified artefacts, and a rusted key. Sure, these photos prove that the treasure does exist, but the fact that the bounty has really been hidden in plain sight for the past decade is a whole other kettle of fish.

In fact, the news has only bolstered the theory that the treasure hunt was a hoax all along. Given the lack of details surrounding the find, it seems totally plausible that either: A) Fenn never hid the chest and went out to stage the shots himself. Or B) Fenn did hide the chest but decided to drive out to the spot and unearth the treasure to make it look like somebody had finally solved the puzzle. After all, is it just a coincidence that the hunt has come to an end a decade after it began?

Linda Bilyeu is among those who still believes that the whole thing is made up, telling Westword.com on June 8th “I believe he never hid the treasure… he needed attention, and this is how he got it”. Others who poured their time, energy, and money into joining the search have also expressed frustration with its sudden end. Among them is Cynthia Meachum, who has begged Fenn for some pointers about how close she and others were to finding it, admitting “I have no closure at this point”.

There’s no telling when, or even if, Fenn will clarify the details of the find: there have been no updates on his website, and the so-called “Thrill of the Chase” Facebook page hasn’t seen a new post since 2018. For now, Forrest Fenn is still exercising his right to remain silent. Perhaps the lucky man who found the chest will come out of the shadows to explain the whole thing. Maybe, as Linda Bilyeu has suggested, Fenn will just start another hunt to satisfy his need to inspire adventure. For now, though, it seems that this modern-day treasure hunt is far from solved.

I hope you were amazed at the fascinating story of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt! Thanks for reading.