For a decade, Forrest Fenn had lived as creator, promoter, steward, and defender of perhaps the most extraordinary treasure hunt America had ever known. He lived to see its conclusion. And then, barely three months after the hunt he had brought into the world had ended, Fenn was gone.

On the morning of September 7, 2020, Fenn was found unconscious in his study, having fallen, according to the police report. He was taken to Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, then released to the care of his family, who returned him to his home. There , never having regained consciousness. The first responders who arrived on the scene that morning were initially responding to a cardiac-arrest call, indicating Fenn may have had a heart attack that precipitated his fall.

His funeral arrangements were private, and searchers were kept at arm’s length. The family did eventually post a message on Fenn’s website, thanking the search community: “To the many searchers who joined us in the thrill of the chase over the last decade, your stories, emails, and tales of the hunt sparked joy in his life and we are forever grateful for your enthusiasm.”Ìę

The author Doug Preston hadn’t been able to be there for Fenn’s 90thÌębirthday in late August—due to COVID-19, the Fenn family held a car parade for friends to drive by and say hello—but Preston had called soon afterÌęand found his friend well.

“Whatever happened to him happened to him pretty quickly. I spoke to him ten days after his birthday, maybe a week,” Preston said. “He sounded great. He didn’t sound like he was in any kind of decline at all. Now, there may have been something going on that I didn’t know about. But his mind was there. He was cheerful. His vigor was still there, in terms of his intellectual capabilities. I did not notice any decline.”

Preston said he could sense a sadness in his friend—a melancholy that the treasure hunt that had defined the final stage of his life had ended.

“He just seemed disappointed that the treasure had been found. A little bit disappointed.”

After Fenn’s death, an outpouring of sadness, grief, and love came from the searcher community, with tributes to Fenn on all the prominent blogs and message boards. Many searchers told stories of their interactions with Fenn, or of what the hunt had meant to them, or just publicly thanked Fenn for what he had brought into their lives.

The hunt was over, and now its architect was gone. The anonymous finder was nowhere to be found, and while that left many—myself included—with countless questions, I thought perhaps this might bring the story of this treasure hunt to a close, at last.

I should have known better.

On September 23, just over two weeks after Fenn died, on the website Medium, a self-publishing platform that allows users to distribute essays and other written works anonymously if they choose. Titled “A Remembrance of Forrest Fenn,” it was written by The Finder,Ìęwho described himself thusly: “The author is the finder and owner of the Forrest Fenn treasure.”

In 3,000 well-crafted words, the finder penned an ode to Fenn, whoÌęhe described as his friend.

“I am the person who found Forrest’s famed treasure,” he wrote. “The moment it happened was not the triumphant Hollywood ending some surely envisioned; it just felt like I had just survived something and was fortunate to come out the other end.”

In his essay, the finder revealed a great deal about the circumstances under which he had found the treasure—but crucially, he would not divulge exactly where he had located it, and said he did not plan to. He was also careful not to let any details about his own identity slip, indicating only that he was a millennial and had student loans to pay off. Beyond that, he was an enigma.

After finishing the essay, I no longer had any doubt that there was a finder.

Much else, though, remained unresolved. The finder had teased so many things in his essay, left me and everyone else wanting more. He’d said he’d answer more questions at some point, but I didn’t particularly want to wait, or leave what he answered up to him alone.

So I contacted him.

Medium doesn’t generally allow readers to contact the author of a piece directly, which is one reason it’s good for anonymous posting. It does allow users to post public comments on a piece, and more than 100 people quickly had, most of them supportive, some of them skeptical, a few of them angry and aggressive. But I wasn’t going to just post my email in the comments where anyone could read it; that left me no guarantee that the person I might end up in contact with would be the finder.

I had one trick up my sleeve, though. There’s a little-known way to send a direct message to the author of a Medium piece: You have to flag a section of text, indicating that it contains an error or a typo. That notifies the author of the piece that something needs to be corrected in his or her work. The system doesn’t give you a lot of space, just enough to describe the problem. So I flagged a section of the essay, barely squeezed in who I was and how to contact me via email, and hoped for the best. I had no guarantee that the finder would look at the message, or that he would understand exactly why he should get in touch. But it was worth a shot.

Less than a day later, an email popped into my inbox. It was from an address whose name referred to Fenn’s treasure. The finder had replied.

He’d heard of my project, he said, and he might be willing to talk to me. But he insisted that we’d have to keep things off the record for now. And so began a month of back-and-forth correspondence, sometimes several emails a day, culminating in my revealing his identity to the world in an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű article in early December 2020, identifying him as Jack Stuef, a 32-year-old medical student from Michigan.

Having written the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű article, my inbox was suddenly flooded with searchers claiming this or that about Stuef or that his solve was fraudulent, and asking me to prove it or use my knowledge to validate their own competing solves. I still had no idea where the treasure was, and I truly didn’t want to know, but that didn’t stop searchers from claiming that I was somehow involved in some of these conspiracies. I know we live in a post-truth world now, but even as conspiracies around the 2020 election dominated life outside the hunt, the level of disbelief I encountered within the chase still shocked me. Should I have been so surprised? Conspiracy theories have plagued this hunt from the start. I’d fallen for them myself.

Still, even if there were some details I couldn’t quite square, I remained sure that Stuef was the finder, and that no grand conspiracy was at play here. How could I be so certain? Part of it was confidence in the facts we all did know. Part of it was, as had said in his fateful, final sermon, understanding that at a certain pointÌę“we have to trust.” And part of it was that I had experienced something the other searchers had not. A few months earlier, I had flown to Santa Fe one last timeÌęand opened Forrest Fenn’s treasure chest myself.

I tightened my mask as I stepped off the plane, out onto the tarmac at Santa Fe Regional AirportÌęand into the coolÌęair. This trip had come together quickly, out of nowhere, really. One day, back when I still didn’t know who the finder was, he’d sent me a particularly unexpected email, offering something I hadn’t really asked forÌębut had absolutely craved.

“Hey,” it read. “Do you want to come see the treasure?”

I pounced on the offer and got to Santa Fe as fast as I could, thrilled at the chance to be so close to something I’d dreamt about for so long.

As I left my hotel the morning after flying in and made my way toward the finder’s lawyer’s offices, the streets of Santa Fe were barren, devoid of the traffic that normally choked Cerrillos Road. It was October, usually one of the busiest times of the year in Santa Fe. In normal years, October brings , featuring hundreds of hot-air balloons and a carnival atmosphere, and enthusiasts come from around the world to experience it. My trips to see Fenn and the other searchers in 2017 and 2018 had overlapped with the festival, and so I can attest both that it’s great, and that it jams Albuquerque and Santa Fe with tourists.

Not this year, I thought as I cruised down the near empty road, my face mask sitting on the console between the two front seats. But it wasn’t just the pandemic that made Santa Fe feel strangely empty. For me, Fenn’s absence loomed larger than the lack of touristsÌęor people driving to work.

This was the first time since learning of this hunt that I had come to Santa Fe for a reason other than to see Fenn; I still had much I wanted to ask him, and now I’d never get the chance. It was impossible not to think of him as I drove along, passing a restaurant in the Santa Fe Railyard where we’d had lunch, going by the turnoff to get to his gallery. The reality was that I couldn’t imagine Santa Fe without him. For better or worse, he and the city he called home had become synonymous in my mind.

It had been a month now since his death. His wife, Peggy, had herself passed the week before I arrived, living just four weeks beyond her husband. Peggy and Forrest Fenn had been married almost 67Ìęyears.

How would Fenn be remembered? He had been so concerned that his father had left no mark, that Marvin Fenn had no imprint on history until his son brought him back via his words and books. Forrest Fenn clearly would not suffer that same fate. His treasure hunt had made a greater impact than Fenn could have ever imagined. Still, his passing so soon after the end of the hunt—a hunt that I believe he’d hoped would outlive him—did end the story of Fenn’s life in the eyes of the outside world. His chapter in history was interesting, compelling, complicated, flawed. A moment in time, an amazing tale. But now over. Fenn had wanted to live on through his treasure hunt, through his chest. With the chest found, I don’t know if he’ll truly do that.

The chest. Now that I was mere minutes away from actually holding it in my hands, I was brimming with anticipation, feeling that little tremble that comes from adrenaline coursing through my body. Was just seeing it as good as finding the treasure? Well, no, you’re a couple million dollars poorer, but in some ways, I don’t know, maybe it was better. A chance to experience and understand this treasure, without the burden of having to own it. At least that’s what I was telling myself.

What did I really know about it? It was small, deceptively so. Prominent searcher Cynthia Meachum had built a replica and placed it out in the wilderness to underscore how near impossible it would be to identify the chest at distance if you didn’t know precisely where it was. It was ten by ten by five inches, and that’s just not very big. And it was heavy. The chest itself weighed 20Ìępounds, the contents weighed 22Ìępounds, and Fenn had needed his famed two trips to get it all to his spot.

There had been a few attempts at chronicling what was in it—some of the best work done by Cynthia’s pal Matt DeMoss. DeMoss’s efforts had been aided by the release of both sets of conference-room pictures, which I now understood had been taken at the finder’s lawyer’s office, the one I was about to visit. Nobody except for Fenn and the finder, however, had been able to really go through the chest, pull everything out, and document the contents—until now. The actual chest, I knew, was the bronze Romanesque lockbox, dating from roughly 1150, with carvings along its sides and top depicting the Castle of Love,Ìę where maidens sit atop the castle, and knights at the base try to scale it and reach them. It was not locked, but it did include a key, and it was latched with a gargoyle of some sort. There was some type of wood, perhaps oak, serving as a lining.

Based on what he believed to be in the chest, DeMoss had compared each item to similar examples currently on saleÌęand guessed the low-end sale value of all the items inside at $555,487, with the high-end sale value at $1,327,450. Even if we split the difference, chances are it would sell for more than that, because these items are part of the Fenn Treasure, a factor DeMoss said he did not incorporate into his analysis.

Included in his estimates were the 265 gold coins of varying types, the gold nuggets and dust, the golden frogs, the golden mirrors, the gold nose rings, the gold necklace—gold, gold, gold. There was the ancient Tairona/Sinu necklace, the Chinese carved jade faces, the turquoise bracelet that Fenn had wanted to buy back, and Fenn’s 20,000-wordÌęautobiography, in addition to a few other, smaller items of note. Then there were the “emeralds, rubies, diamonds” that were often mentioned as being in the chest. Were those merely included in what was perhaps the chest’s most impressive single item, the golden dragon bracelet, which itself contained hundreds of precious stones? Or were there additional jewels to be found beyond that? Nobody knew, except for Fenn, the finder, and whoever had been there when the chest was examined. There could still be curiosities waiting, surprises to be found, answers to be had. Now I was going to be privy to them.

I’d agreed to a few conditions when the finder had offered to let me view the chest. First, we’d agreed that I would pay his attorneys’ hourly rates for their time, such that my seeing the chest wouldn’t actually cost the finder money—pretty standard journalistic practice. He’d also stipulated that he didn’t want me to identify his attorneys—there were three representing him, two men and a woman—in any meaningful way, so that they couldn’t be tracked down by overaggressive searchers. I agreed. And then one more: the finder wanted to make sure I didn’t open the vial containing Fenn’s autobiography, which remained sealed, and that if I could read any of what was inside through the glass, I wouldn’t relay any of that information. I agreed to thatÌęas well.

The conditions weren’t onerous, and I was eager to make this happen. As far as I knew, examining the chest was not a privilege that had been extended to anyone else—and in that, it was not lost on me that I was getting to do something that others might not like. I hadn’t searched for a few years now, and even if it hadn’t been found, I hadn’t planned on searching again. But still, there were people far more deserving than I who would have killed to see what I was about to see. Even if the finder managed to give the chest some sort of public exhibition at some point, I assumed no one would get to go through it, touch it, experience it the way I was about to. As I parked the car, I could feel a certain weight to what I was about to do, a responsibility to do it all right, whatever that meant. That, and maybe a few pangs of guilt, for getting to enjoy what other, better searchers couldn’t.

I parked near the offices, put on my mask, and walked along the sunny, empty streets toward the front door. There were COVID-related signs posted about not entering without an appointment. I was pretty sure I had one of those—though even at that late moment, there was still the tiniest sliver of doubt in my mind. At the time, I still didn’t know who the finder really was, and hence had flown out here on a tiny plane on the offer of someone whose name I didn’t know, based on a cold-call email and little more than that. I was pretty sure, as close to certain as I could be, that this was the finder and that everything was legit, but until I was actually opening that chest myself, nothing was truly guaranteed.

So it was heartening when I swung open the large, heavy door, went into what seemed to be an impressive professional suite of law offices, gave my name at the front desk, and waited only moments before the finder’s attorney came out and introduced herself.

“We’ll just go right in here,” she said, pointing to a set of doors leading into a conference room, “and then we’ll bring the chest right in.”

That simple, huh?

I pushed open the doors and entered a reasonably sized room with an oblong wooden conference table covered by glass. It was instantly familiar from the two sets of pictures posted to validate the find.

“Is this where you showed Fenn the chest?” I asked.

“It is,” she replied. “He sat right there.” She indicatedÌęa chair at one end of the table. “You can sit right where he sat if you want.”

I wasn’t sure if that was a little too fanboyish. But it seemed like a good place to sit anyway, so I threw my backpack down near where she’d gestured. This was perhaps the only time on the hunt when I was absolutely, definitely, unquestionably following in Fenn’s footsteps, instead of puttering around in the wilderness two states away from where he’d left his treasure. HereÌęI was really and truly doing just what he had done, only a few months before, when he’d gone through this chest for the first time in a decade.

From the moment I’d entered this chase, the chest had been the goal. In some ways, it was a MacGuffin, like the Maltese FalconÌęor the Death Star plans—it was what this chase was about, yes, but it wasn’t really what this chase was about, y’know? Still, it mattered. Up until this moment, the chest had been purely theoretical to me. I’d never expected to find it, so I wasn’t one of those searchers who had already spent the money in it ten times over. For meÌęit was more about figuring out the clues, getting the answer.

Yet now that I was going to be laying eyes on it, touching it, it moved from the realm of the theoretical to the actual in a hurry.

That understanding fundamentally altered my entire view of the chase. It meant that despite whatever else he’d done, Fenn had been telling the truth about this box and what was in it: that he had hidden it somewhere out there, and the finder really and truly had obtained itÌęand was now letting me see and touch it. That most basic set of facts was real, and that gave me a sense of certainty about this chase, of a kind I had never really had until now. Did that improve Fenn’s standing a bit in my mind? It was a complicated question. To this point, I’d managed somewhat to separate the man from the hunt, even though it was hard to do. And knowing that he was telling the truth did mean something for the man, somewhat. It didn’t mean he was without failings, his chase without its problems. But he had done this, just the way he’d said he had. And that, in my mind, counted for something.

I started to ask if they needed me to sign anything before we began, as I stretched on the latex gloves that I’d brought for the examination. Then, just like that, the conference-room door opened and a man walked in bearing a bronze box, ten by ten by five, worn and weathered and perfect. He hurried quickly over to my side of the table as I, in true surprise, stammered something out about not expecting it all to be quite so easy.

He chuckled in reply as he walked up and casually handed me Forrest Fenn’s treasure chest.

Excerpted from ,Ìęby Daniel Barbarisi. Copyright © 2021 by Daniel Barbarisi. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The post I Got to See Forrest Fenn’s Treasure with My Own Eyes appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It took two months of correspondenceÌębefore the man who found Forrest Fenn’s treasure toldÌęme his name.

We’d been emailing since September, and I honestly didn’t expect to ever know who he really was. I was fine with that; as a fellow treasure hunter, I completely understood his desire for anonymity.

Since 2017, I had been pursuing Fenn’s treasure, too, becoming a kinda-sorta searcher in order to tell the story of Fenn’s hunt in my upcoming book , to be published by Knopf in June. I’d been in the trenches, read Fenn’s over and over, ended up in places I probably shouldn’t have been, and gone to places where other people died trying to find it.

A decade ago, Fenn hid his treasure chest, containing gold and other valuables estimated to be worth at least a million dollars, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Not long after, he published a memoir called , which included a mysterious 24-line poem that, if solved, would lead searchers to the treasure. Fenn had suggested that the loot was secreted away at the place where he had envisioned lying down to die, back when he’d believed a 1988 cancer diagnosis was terminal. Since the hunt began in 2010, many thousands of searchers had gone out in pursuit——and the chase became an international story.

So many people had invested and sacrificed so much in pursuit of Fenn’s treasure that it was possible the finder would face threats, be they legal or physical, from people who resented them or wished them ill.

And that was exactly what was beginning to play out.

This past June, Fenn announced that the treasure had been found by a man from “back east” who wanted to remain anonymous—even, once we were in contact, to me. So despite exchanging dozens of emails with the finder, and discussing the details of the chest and what locating it meant to him, I never pressed him about who he was, and he never volunteered.

Last week, he told me the situation had changed. Fenn had been targeted by lawsuits both before and after the chest was found, by hunters claiming that the treasure was rightfully theirs. One of the lawsuits, filed immediately after Fenn announced the hunt was over, also targets the unknown finder as a defendant, claiming that he had stolen the plaintiff’s solve and used it to find the chest. That litigation had advanced to a procedural stage during which the finder expected his name would likely come out in court. So while he remained guarded about his solve and the location where he discovered the treasure, he now didn’t mind telling me who he really was.

And that’s when I learned that a 32-year-old Michigan native and medical student was the person who had finally solved Fenn’s poem. His name is Jack Stuef.

Stuef first heard about Fenn’s chase on Twitter in early 2018, and couldn’t believe it had escaped his notice for eight whole years. He was instantly hooked.

“I’ve probably thought about it for at least a couple hours a day, every day, since I learned about it,” Stuef says. “Every day.”

The treasure hunt immediately brought him back to his youth, when he was obsessed with a 2002 TV series called , which allowed viewers to try and solve a real-life mystery that carried a million-dollar prize. Stuef also got caught up in a book by magician David Blaine, , which combined autobiography with a treasure hunt and offered a $100,000 prize.

Over time, those teenage dreams of adventure receded, and Stuef went on to attend Georgetown University, where he served as editor in chief of the , a campus humor magazine. He graduated in December 2009 and began a career as a writer, both in humor—he worked for the Onion—and in more traditional media. He became embroiled in a few controversies early in his career, both at Wonkette, which he left after he made what Poynter describes as and while freelancing for Buzzfeed, which after an article Stuef wrote incorrectly painted a popular internet cartoonist as a hard-line Republican. He left the media business soon after.

“I don’t think those were giant incidents,” Stuef says. “I regret them, but I don’t think about them very often. It was a long time ago now.”

He soon entered a postbaccalaureate program, and then enrolled in medical school. But he disliked most everything about medicine beyond treating patients, he says, and something else captured his attention: Fenn’s chase. He was soon reading the hunter blogs to learn the basics, and he bought Fenn’s memoir, The Thrill of the Chase, before diving into as much primary source material as he could find. His method was to devour every Fenn interview, doing anything he could to hear and absorb his words directly, in an effort to better understand the man’s personality and motivations.

As the hunt took up more and more of his time, Stuef mostly kept the extent of his pursuit hidden from friends and family. He didn’t think they would understand.

“I think I got a little embarrassed by how obsessed I was with it,” Stuef says. “If I didn’t find it, I would look kind of like an idiot. And maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself what a hold it had on me.”

Two years later, he had achieved what so many other searchers could not, finding and claiming Fenn’s treasure. (Stuef’s status as the finder was independently verified with the Fenn family.)ÌęHe retrieved the chest on Saturday, June 6, 2020, in Wyoming, and began the long drive down to Santa Fe to deliver it to Fenn that same day. That evening, news of the find was already beginning to come out, as Fenn believed it must. “‘We should let [searchers] know as soon as you have it,’” Stuef says Fenn told him.

“His thought was that, as soon as it’s out of place, we need to let people know,” Stuef says. “People have died. There could be issues.”

Stuef asked Fenn, though, that he be allowed to remain anonymous, and they both seemed to agree that the location of the find should be kept secret.

But controversy quickly swirled, as many hunters, unsatisfied with the lack of disclosure, decided this meant that —that Fenn had never really hidden the treasure, or that he had unilaterally ended the hunt without a real finder. The backlash took Fenn by surprise, according to those around him. To address it, several weeks after the find, he released photos of the chest and of himself going through it after Stuef delivered it to Santa Fe, which provided enough confirmation for some. In July, Fenn suggested to Stuef that they also reveal the state where the treasure was found, in order to give further closure to some hunters. Stuef agreed.

Beyond that, though, he remained silent, and might have stayed that way for some time.

And then Forrest Fenn died.

On September 23, two weeks after Fenn passed away in his home at age 90, a post surfaced on Medium, a platform that allows users to self-publish essays and other writing, anonymously if they choose. Called “,” it carried the byline “The Finder,” along with a bio that declared: “The author is the finder and owner of the Forrest Fenn Treasure.”

In 3,000 well-crafted words, the finder penned an ode to Fenn, who he described as his friend, even though he’d only known him briefly.

“I am the person who found Forrest’s famed treasure,” he wrote. “The momentÌęit happened was not the triumphant Hollywood ending some surely envisioned; it just felt like I had just survived something and was fortunate to come out the other end.”

In his essay, the finder revealed a great deal about the circumstances under which he had discovered the treasure—but, crucially, he would not divulge exactly where he had located it, and said he didn’t plan to. He was also careful not to let any details about his own identity slip, indicating only that he was a millennial and had student loans to pay off. Beyond that, he was an enigma.

He explained that in 2018 he had figured out the location where the longtime Santa Fe art dealer and former fighter pilot wished to die, and then spent a combined 25 days over the next two years searching the general area until he finally located the treasure. He said that, to find the solution, he’d carefully listened to things Fenn had said in interviews, finding a few crucial crumbs.

“[Fenn] never made more than a couple of subtle slip-ups in front of all the dogged reporters who came to his house, and even those apparently haven’t been caught by anyone besides me,” the finder wrote.

He included pictures of the chest, some of them taken in the wilderness shortly after the treasure was found, others taken at what was assumed to be a lawyer’s office, showing Fenn examining the chest.

Still, there were doubters. Many searchers refused to believe that the Medium post was written by the true finder, and suggested it was fraudulent—perhaps written by Fenn’s grandson, Shiloh Old, or by his professional writer pal, , or even by Fenn himself before his death, intended to be released posthumously.

But I didn’t think any of that.ÌęIn fact, after finishing the essay, I was pretty certain it was all real. And although the finder wrote that he would eventually answer more questions, the journalist in me didn’t particularly want to wait, or to leave what he answered up to him alone.

So I reached out.

Medium doesn’t generally allow readers to directly contact the author of a piece, which is one reason it’s good for anonymous posting. It does allow users to post public comments, and more than 100 people quickly did that, most of them supportive, some skeptical, a few angry and aggressive. But I wasn’t going to just post my email address in the comments, where anyone could read it. Doing that left me no guarantee that the person I might end up in contact with would be the finder.

I had one trick up my sleeve, though. There’s a little-known way to send a direct message to the author of a Medium story: you flag a section of text, indicating that it contains an error or typo. This notifies the author that something needs to be corrected. The system doesn’t give you a lot of space, just enough to describe the problem. So I flagged a section, barely squeezed in who I was and my email address, and hoped for the best. I had no assurances that the finder would look at the message, or that he would understand exactly why he should get in touch. But it was worth a shot.

Less than a day later, an email popped into my in-box. The finder had replied. He’d heard of my book project, he said, and he might be willing to talk to me.

And so began months of back-and-forth, sometimes involving several emails a day. It didn’t really matter that I didn’t know who the finder was for most of that time. I hung on every detail, every minor revelation he offered up about the treasure that had occupied me for so long.

Last week, after a lull in our ongoing conversation, the finder emailed again, explaining that one of the court cases surrounding the find had taken an unexpected turn, and his name was likely to come out as part of the process. So he told me who he was, and gave me permission to tell the world.

The case that prompted him to step from behind the curtain was brought by a Chicago real estate attorney named Barbara Andersen, who of the treasure had located it by hacking her texts and emails and stealing her solve. She believed the treasure was in New Mexico.

Stuef says he never met nor heard of Andersen before the suit; he denies her charges and says the treasure was nowhere near New Mexico. That has not stopped a New Mexico federal court judge from allowing the suit to proceed. Last week, Stuef learned that, as a result of Fenn’s death, the subpoena against Fenn would be transferred to his heirs and estate, which is in possession of Stuef’s information. This should allow Andersen to refile her suit, naming Stuef as a defendant.

Stuef had expected that finding the chest would bring some level of blowback, that his possession of an item desired by so many makes him a target.

“I thought that whoever found the chest would be absolutely hated, because it ends everyone’s dream,” he says. “That’s something of a burden. I realize I put an end to something that meant so much to so many people.”

But even if he anticipated challenges to his find, being a subject of a lawsuit has been an unsettling experience.

“I always thought that, based on people suing Forrest in the past, it was something that could happen,” Stuef says.

This treasure hunt has never been easy on its participants; Fenn and his family experienced a great deal of harassment from searchers who went too far during the years the hunt was active—everything from stalking to threats to . This is why Stuef hoped to remain anonymous, and why, even now, with his name known, he won’t disclose where he’s living.

Many searchers I’ve talked to appreciate his desire for anonymity, and I understand it as well. But one thing many searchers have a harder time grasping is Stuef’s decision to withhold where he found the treasure, even though the chest has since been removed.

People have died looking for the chest. Others have gone bankrupt. Many more have spent countless hours in search of it, and they want some degree of resolution. On our various excursions out West, my search partner and I both found ourselves a little too obsessed at points, and it took its toll. There are real human costs to this search, and knowing the final location could offer the desired sense of closure so many are now seeking.

Stuef says he’s sympathetic to those feelings.

“This is the most difficult question to answer, because I know there’s so many people who just want to know. They worked on this for a long time. And they just want to be handed the answer. I totally understand that. But doing that, I think, is a death sentence to this special place.”

Stuef fears that Fenn’s spot, if revealed, will become a pilgrimage site for Fenn devotees.

“It’s not an appropriate place to become a tourist destination. It has huge meaning to Forrest, and I don’t want to see it destroyed,” Stuef says. “And as much as I tried not to develop an attachment to the place, eventually I did, as well. I had whole days out there looking, and I would take a nap in the afternoon every day, as I said on Medium, under the pine trees. It was very peaceful for me.”

Stuef is trying to find a balance between the various entities, because he feels responsible to all of them. To the search community and its desire to know the whole truth; to himself and his sense of what is right; to nature and this peaceful spot, which he does not want to see ruined; and to Fenn. Ultimately, Stuef believes he’s being consistent with what Fenn wanted when he was alive, and honoring his legacy.

“He didn’t want to see it turned into a tourist attraction,” Stuef says of the treasure site. “We thought it was not appropriate for that to happen. He was willing to go to great lengths, very great lengths, to avoid ever having to tell the location.”

Because of his stand, talking to Stuef can be maddening at times. For my book, I’ve interviewed him about his solve, discussed the process he used to come up with it, and chronicled the various searches he went on as he sought the exact spot, learning fascinating tidbits in the process. For example, he’s told me that one reason it took him two years to retrieve the treasure, even after figuring out the general area in 2018, was that the “blaze”—Fenn’s all-important final clue, found out in the wilderness,Ìęintended to let a searcher know they’re in the exact right spot—had been damaged. He doesn’t mind being open with all of that. And yet there are still things he holds back or talks around, in order to make sure, even now, that no one can figure out the precise location.

Still, listening to Stuef talk about it, he makes it seem so attainable, so simple: that the key was really just understanding Forrest Fenn. Stuef hunted solo, never discussed his search with others, stayed away from the blogs after his initial looks at them, and tried hard not to get caught up in any groupthink. He did his utmost just to focus on Fenn’s words and primary sources, and understand those as best he could.

“I don’t want to ruin this treasure hunt by saying it was made for an English major, but it’s based on a close read of a text,” Stuef says. “I mean, that’s what it is. It’s having the correct interpretation of a poem. I understood him by reading his words, and listening to him talk over and over and over and over again. And seeking out anything I could get my hands on that told me who he was.”

When asked if figuring out the puzzles required the use of anagrams, or GPS coordinates, or sophisticated codes of any sort, Stuef was clear in his response.

“No,” he says. “But I don’t want to say that people are stupid for thinking those things were valid, or that they were being irrational. I think Forrest designed this to be fun, and whatever people got out of it, that gave them fun, I think, to me, is rational. And they were doing it right, in that way.”

The solution, Stuef says, is tied far more to understanding Fenn’s emotions, and to a close examination of the poem itself, than to puzzle-solving skills. Fenn simply didn’t care about those kinds of things. He was more interested in adventure, legacy, history, narrative.

“There was no reason to think that those things would be something he was interested in, or had any experience in,” Stuef says. “I mean, he was coming to this not from the perspective of being a huge fan of puzzles or a puzzle master. He was not a fan of armchair treasure hunts. His point of reference was pirates! His purpose was not to create a great puzzle and show everyone how smart and slick he was. His purpose was this weird idea to entomb himself. And to create a historic legend. None of that supports armchair solutions. And he was open about that.”

So far, ownership of the chest has not made Stuef a rich man. He has not sold it yet, has not even had it appraised, but the expected windfall has allowed him to quit worrying about repaying his student loans for medical school. With that in mind, he has decided to leave the profession before becoming a practicing doctor, and may move into equities investing next.

“I was kind of in this sunk-cost-fallacy dead end with that, where I didn’t want to quit, because I didn’t know what else to do,” he says. “I didn’t know how to pay off my loans if I didn’t become a doctor. [The chest] was kind of my lifeline.”

Once the time is right, he still plans to sell the chest. When he does, he will try to honor a “final wish” of Fenn’s: to have the chest end up in a specific place where searchers can view it, though he declined to say exactly where.

“Before he died, he was going to try to help me with getting a certain party to buy it,” Stuef says. “And I think his hope was that it would be able to be displayed. 
 And so that’s my first step. After that, I think I would probably try and sell to the public.”

If it gets that far, he’s unsure whether it would be best to sell it as a complete package, or to break it up, allowing individual searchers to own a piece of Fenn’s treasure.

“I’d guess we kind of try and test the market in some way to see what it would sell for all together, because there’s a good chance it’s worth more all together, as the Fenn treasure,” Stuef says. “But, you know, it’s possible. There are a lot of searchers out there who would want maybe one item in there, they couldn’t afford the whole thing, but it would mean a lot to them to have one item. So it is still possible to break out.”

With the chest located, one part of the treasure hunt is finished now—the chase, the part that obsessed all of us and pushed us to places we maybe shouldn’t have been. But the story has not ended. So many people have a stake in this hunt, it means so much to so many, that the tale didn’t, and doesn’t, end with a man finding a treasure chest.

That, in so many ways, is just opening up the box.

The post The Man Who Found Forrest Fenn’s Treasure appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.