Early on in his career, video game designer Jason Rohrer embarked on a strange quest. Instead of trying to make huge blockbusters like Halo or Grand Theft Auto, he produced games about what it means to be human. His work was an argument that video games could be about more than shooting robots and aliens. He wanted to make people laugh, love, and cry.

His game Passage is a five-minute meditation on the beauty of life and the inevitability of death and part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. A Game for Someone was designed to only be played 2,000 years in the future and is currently buried somewhere in the Nevada desert.

“He created a nesting doll game that could not be completed in a single human lifetime called Inside a Star Filled Sky,” Patrick Jagoda, a game designer and English professor at the University of Chicago told me. “His games have been very, very high concept.”

But now, Rohrer is taking his art from the digital space and into the real world with a treasure hunt based in New England. On Thursday, Rohrer launched the hunt, called Project Skydrop. The first person to solve his seemingly straightforward puzzle will find a gold statue and bounty of cryptocurrency. But given the ambition and scope of his previous work, most everyone familiar with his games—including me—is wondering: What does Rohrer have up his sleeve this time?

The Details of the Hunt

Project Skydrop is like a treasure hunt from the future. Instead of a brittle, yellowed map or a cryptic poem guiding searchers, this hunt is largely digital. The treasure itself is a sculpture made of 10 oz of solid gold—worth about $23,000—engraved with a Bitcoin wallet recovery phrase that unlocks a further crypto bounty: 50 percent of the pool of $20 entry fees to join the hunt. The sculpture isn’t buried, or even hidden. It’s just sitting out somewhere in the open in New England.

The clues? A combination of aerial photographs that start unhelpfully close to the treasure—one foot off the ground—and a circle on a map that starts out unhelpfully far away—a 500-mile radius. Every day, the aerial photographs zoom out to provide more context about the treasure’s surroundings. Every day the circle shrinks—down to a one-foot diameter search area after three weeks.

“I know it’s not gonna be solvable on day one,” Rohrer told me from his home in New Hampshire. “And I know it’s definitely going to be solvable on day 21.”

“Definitely solvable” is an attribute that few other treasure hunts have had over the years. Most have failed in one way or another.

Forrest Fenn’s million-dollar chest of gold took ten years to find, and five searchers died in pursuit. By the end of it, in 2020, Fenn was the subject of several lawsuits. Because of this chaos, the treasure’s finder did his best to remain anonymous, and to this day the general public doesn’t know exactly where the treasure was hidden. It’s a mess.

Twelve treasures were buried in major American cities for The Secret, a treasure hunt created by Byron Preiss in 1982, but so far only three have been found. Preiss died in 2005. That hunt was simply too hard.

Even the original armchair treasure hunt, Masquerade, from 1979, ended in scandal when it turned out that the finder had used inside information to locate the jewel-encrusted golden hare that people were looking for.

The legacy of modern treasure hunts, in other words, is controversy, scandal, and failure. They end badly. They look a lot like video games that needed a little more playtesting before being released.

“Treasure hunts in the past haven’t really worked that well,” Rohrer said. “They kind of fundamentally break.”

Project Skydrop, then, is a game designer’s response to those failures. The shrinking-circle, closed-timeline design of the hunt keeps it from dragging on for decades. The final location of the treasure and the identity of the finder won’t be a mystery: in order to claim the Bitcoin, the finder is required to upload a video of themselves with the treasure when they find it.

Rohrer and his creative partner, Thomas Bailey, have also taken steps to make sure that no one gets hurt by another searcher.

“Let’s say the treasurer’s worth a million dollars, right? It’s life-changing money. And as you come over the crest, you see someone a few feet closer to the treasure than you. What do you do? Do you start running? Do you start screaming? Do you start shooting? So we had to figure out a way to prevent that as best we could.”

Averting Another Forrest Fenn Debacle

What they came up with is a clause in the entry agreement that searchers must “obtain the treasure peacefully,” and in the hope of enforcing that rule Rohrer and Bailey fitted the area around the treasure with cameras—like a bizarro, non-violent Hunger Games.

Those cameras upload to the Project Skydrop website in real time, so barring technical difficulties, anyone who pays the hunt’s entry fee can watch the treasure hunt unfold, including the moment someone finds and claims tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of dollars worth of treasure.

“If you think about that moment,” Rohrer said, “and what that moment will feel like in the grand scope of all human experience, it’ll just be an incredible moment, right?”

It will be quite the moment. But is it art? Is it very, very high concept?

“It is possible that he made a treasure hunt and that’s it, full stop,” Patrick Jagoda told me. “But based on the 20-or-so games that he’s made in the past, I bet you there are layers of meaning to what this thing is.”

Perhaps sending people out into the world in the pursuit of a solid gold sculpture is a statement on being a celebrated video game creator, but not a particularly well-compensated one. Perhaps it’s a commentary on our increasing dependence on screens and pictures and satellite imagery to navigate the natural world. Perhaps he just wants to make the real world feel a little bit more like a video game.

When I asked Rohrer directly if there was more going on here than meets the eye, he laughed because even if there was, he said he wouldn’t be telling me about it.

But then he told a long story about his most successful game, One Hour, One Life, in which players build a family and then a civilization over the course of generations and every hour of gameplay equals one human lifespan. One Hour, One Life incorporates a lot of the themes of his early games—the meaning of life and death, andÌęthe way our actions today echo into the future.

As the creator of this game, however, he can see how people are playing it—the degree to which a digital life can take over a real one.

“When the game first came out and I was looking at statistics, there were a number of players who played it ten hours a day, seven days a week for like 11 months,” he said.

“I’ve interacted with a number of members of this community and, you know, a lot of them are like 25 years old, living at their parents house, spending all day playing video games. And some of the interactions I’ve had have been pretty heartbreaking. It’s like, ‘I know that I’ll never have a family of my own. And the only way I get to feel like the joy of parenthood is through your game. Thank you, Jason.’

“I feel like I want to make something that kind of lifts them up out of that and kind of energizes them or something—gets them out of their chair.”

When Forrest Fenn launched his treasure hunt, he did it to get kids “out of the game room, off their texting machines and into the mountains,” he said.

Fenn spent much of his life in the mountains. Rohrer has spent much of his life making video games. But they’ve arrived at a similar place.

“Like yesterday I climbed to the top of a mountain with my wife and two younger children and our dog,” he said. “And we picked wild blueberries up at the top of the mountain. And it was a really hot day and once we got down to the bottom of the mountain we swam in these beautiful cascading, crystal clear waterfalls. That felt like living to me.”

In other words, Rohrer is still exploring what it means to be human. He’s still trying to make people laugh, love, and cry. But as the creator and curator of all that screen time, it seems like he’s also now trying to atone for something.

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The world’s most interesting video game designer just hid a treasure in the woods. What’s he up to? Jason Rohrer has been pushing the limits of game design for 20 years, but his latest creation takes players into the forests of New England in search of a sculpture made of solid gold. The catch? He says there isn’t one. But people familiar with his past work aren’t so sure.

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One motivation for exploring a square each week, come rain or shine, was to make being out in nature part of my routine. I hoped that becoming connected with where I live, with its weather and seasons, would keep me attuned to the seedlings pushing through pavements, the migrating birds passing overhead, the provenance of the food I eat, and reveal some interesting new running routes too.

Taking just a few minutes every month to , which I’d done for the past three years, had certainly made me happier. Each time I returned to the tree I was surprised by how much nature had changed in the past few weeks. Fun, too, had been my year of full-moon forays, getting outdoors for a run, ride, walk or swim on every full moon, and also a year of enjoying coffee outside at least monthly. If hospital gardens help people to heal, if doctors now prescribe exercise in nature, then committing to fifty-two outdoor missions sounded like a sensible undertaking. By now the habit of heading out once a week with my camera and notebook felt comfortably established.

It was a flat, grey day beneath a flat, grey December sky. The river flowing through today’s square was flat and grey, rippling as the tide nurdled ever lower. My mood, however, was neither flat nor grey. I was looking forward to this one.

A few off-limit jetties jutted out into the current, infrastructure for pipelines and industry. A conveyor belt rumbled along one, filling a barge with gravel, but all else was quiet. This was, perhaps, a grid square that only a map nerd like me could derive pleasure from. More than half of it was blue on my map, but that was an incongruous representation of the muddy, intimidating industrial estuary spreading out before me. I didn’t dare swim out to explore it.

Behind me, the rest of the square was fenced off by a shooting range, an electricity substation filled with fizzing power lines, a cement factory, a slime-covered canal (featuring a sofa tipped into the water, whose lurid colour perfectly matched the algae), and a police firearms training centre complete with replica streets and life-size sections of planes and trains. This brought back fond memories of getting a day’s pay back when I was in the Territorial Army at university to don ‘civvy’ clothes and cheerfully lob half-bricks and milk bottles at massed ranks of policemen in riot gear. It was all fun and larks until they mounted their response charge at us


And so, in terms of my exploration, the square was effectively reduced to little more than the footpath along the embankment’s flood defences, plus whatever muddy ‘beach’ was revealed as the tide fell. That was fine by me as I’d studied the tide timetable and arrived a couple of hours before low tide, past a yard filled with ships’ anchors, ten-feet tall and tonnes galore. I was here to go mudlarking among the slimy green rocks, brown seaweed and thick grey mud of the foreshore.

A mudlark is someone who scavenges in river mud at low tide, looking for valuable items. It was a way of life in London during the 18th and 19th centuries, when mudlarks searched the Thames’ shore for anything of value. They earned little but enjoyed an unusual amount of independence for the period, plus they got to keep whatever they found or earned.

Lara Maiklem explores the ancient, murky, tidal foreshore of the Thames, whose ebbs and flows still churn objects to the surface that have been hidden and preserved in the mud for centuries. I had recently devoured her fabulous book (and enticing ), and was fascinated by the greedy prospect of finding treasure, Roman roofing, Tudor shoes, and messages in bottles.

I donned wellies and waterproof trousers, climbed up and over the graffiti-covered embankment wall, and dropped onto the foreshore to begin my search. Its lowest reaches were a lethal gloop of deep, sloppy, stinking mud. I settled for making my way along the line where rock and mud meet, slipping over mounds of bladderwrack, a brown seaweed studded with air bladders that help it to float upright and absorb nutrients when submerged.

At low tides, the exposed seaweed forms dense beds, which theoretically should provide shelter for all sorts of creatures. But I’m afraid I saw not a single living thing among it all. A few gulls bobbed on the river, and semi-feral ponies grazed on the embankment behind me. But the water was pretty grim.

Only a few pearly-white oyster shells gave any suggestion of life in the grey mud. Over the past 200 years, habitat loss, pollution and overfishing slashed the oyster population around the UK by 95 percent, though it is now on the increase again. Across the country, things are improving from the low point of 1957, when the Thames was declared biologically dead and the river was a foul-smelling drain. It is a travesty, however, that even today, not a single river in Britain is free from pollution.

I had fully intended to find priceless loot within minutes of beginning my mudlarking. Instead, I found a rusty chair frame and heaps of plastic, including a label saying ‘BAG IT AND BIN IT, DON’T FLUSH IT’. I picked up a 1980s milk bottle with ‘PLEASE RETURN BOTTLE’ embossed on the glass. All interesting enough, but where was that jewel-encrusted sword when you needed it?

Truth be told, my patience began to wane within about twenty minutes, as I had known it would. This was actually one reason I’d decided to try mudlarking in the first place, to remind myself to slow down, to savour the process of searching, and not to be so hung up on productivity or getting things done.

So I persevered, picking my way among rusty pieces of metal, crisp packets and drinking straws. We used to throw away 4.7 billion plastic straws, 316 million plastic stirrers and 1.8 billion plastic-stemmed cotton buds each year. Those numbers plummeted once they were banned: proof of the immediate impact that quick, simple law changes can have.

I stood up straight to stretch my back and to watch a ship pass down the river, filled with the romanticism of imagining all the places for which it might be bound. Nineveh, perhaps? But my maritime musings have become more accurate, if less exotic, since I downloaded the Marine Radar app, which tells you about any ships you see.

So this was the Maltese cargo ship Celestine sliding down the estuary with a salt-caked smoke stack and a cargo of cars. Heading in the other direction, a Dutch trailing suction hopper dredger slurped up the same gloop I was searching through. Dredgers work like monstrous vacuum cleaners, sucking up sand, mud and gravel from the channel to store onboard and discharge later. I wondered what gems had unknowingly been dumped through its pipes.

I bent down again and kept looking. Now I found a metal fork, a white comb and the compulsory shopping trolley. How did they end up in the river?

A discarded condom, unopened, told its tale of a disappointed date lobbing it off a bridge on his unplanned lonely trudge home to an empty bed. A golf putter, green with slime, had me imagining a pitch and putt rage, a nice day out soured by a tantrum and the golf club arcing through the summer sky into the water.

What else did I find? A pair of red pebbles caught my eye. A smooth, tactile fragment of green bottle marked ‘A.A. & Co’. Two symmetrical shards of tile. A fragment of porcelain decorated with blue and white lines, dots and circles.

That was about it.

But still, I was 99 percent certain that Christopher Columbus had dined off that very plate, munching corn on the cob as he set sail to discover Australia. One can always dream


Even though I found no verifiable bullion or antiques, I had enjoyed trying to imagine stories for all the mundane objects I collected and brought home that morning. All these banal discoveries were grist to the mill as I learnt how to be an enthusiastic amateur. I was like the young boy Calvin in the comic strip, digging up the garden with Hobbes, his pet tiger. Hobbes asks Calvin what he has found.

‘A few dirty rocks, a weird root, and some disgusting grubs,’ answers Calvin from deep in his hole.
‘On your first try?’ asks Hobbes in delight.
‘There’s treasure everywhere,’ exclaims Calvin.

This is an excerpt from Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness by Alastair Humphreys. Available fromÌę and all good bookshops in the U.S., as well as directly from the publisher at

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TheÌęonline auction of items from Forrest Fenn’s famed treasure chest closed on Tuesday. In total, the sale generated $1,307,946.

All 476 artifacts in the collection were sold, and a total of 1,643 people placed bids for a piece of the fortune, Heritage Auctions communications director Robert Wilonsky told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.

brought in the most cash, with the highest bidder taking it home for $55,200. The next highest price was forÌęa purportedly containing Fenn’s 20,000-word autobiography, which went for $48,000. In his 2010 memoir The Thrill of the Chase, Fenn wrote that he included the autobiography “because maybe the lucky finder would want to know a little about the foolish person who abandoned such an opulent cache.”

The sale is yet another wrinkle in the saga sparked by Fenn in 2010, when the late art dealer hid the chest filled with gold and jewels somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Obsessives searched far and wide in pursuit of the riches, with a 24-line poem as their only clue. One man served time in prison for at Yellowstone National Park. while looking for the cache.

The Dallas-based auction house acquired the bulk of the treasure from Tesouro Sagrado Holdings, LLC, which bought the chest from Michigan native Jack Stuef, the man who found Fenn’s treasure in 2020. A few of the items, including the chest and dragon bracelet, were kept by the proprietors of Tesouro Sagrado Holdings.

last month, Stuef said he no longer owns any of the treasure and has no financial interest in its sale.ÌęÌę

“After my identity was revealed almost two years ago, some fans of the treasure hunt reached out to tell me they hoped they could purchase an item from the treasure to commemorate their own adventures searching for it,” Stuef wrote. “I’m happy that today those people finally have the opportunity to do so, with a large number of items from which to choose.”

Fenn, who died in 2020 at age 90, admitted he never knew how much the treasure was actually worth. Nevertheless, news reports over the years have thrown around estimates of $1 million to $5 million.

This auction is not a definitive valuation of the treasure—not all of the items in the chest were up for sale, after all—but we now know that you can buy a decent chunk of Fenn’s curiosities for less than the asking price ofÌę.

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In 2010, New Mexico author and art dealer Forrest Fenn hid a treasure chest in the Rocky Mountains, and for the next decade, scores of searchers turned their lives upside down in pursuit of gold. Now, owning some of Fenn’s storied jewels will only require cold, hard cash.

Last Friday, a Dallas-based auction house opened online bidding for 476 items found in the chest, including centuries-old gold jewelry, coins, and other artifacts collected by Fenn. Among the collection’s standouts are a 549-gram Alaskan gold placer, a 1928 Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle coin, and a Colombian gold pectoral from circa 200-600 A.D., according to a news release from .

The auctioneer acquired the items from Tesouro Sagrado Holdings, LLC, which bought the treasure chest from Michigan nativeÌęJack Stuef, the man who found Fenn’s treasure in 2020. A recent batch of court documents shows that Fenn’s treasure was likely buried in Yellowstone National Park.ÌęThe chest, the dragon bracelet, and a few other items are not for sale, because the proprietors of Tesouro Sagrado Holdings have kept them. Bidding closes on December 12.

last week, Stuef said he no longer owns any of the treasure and has no financial interest in its future sale.

“After my identity was revealed almost two years ago, some fans of the treasure hunt reached out to tell me they hoped they could purchase an item from the treasure to commemorate their own adventures searching for it,” Stuef wrote. “I’m happy that today those people finally have the opportunity to do so, with a large number of items from which to choose.”

Perhaps the most coveted object for Fenn devotees is . As of Tuesday afternoon, it was going for $13,000.

In his 2010 memoir The Thrill of the Chase, Fenn wrote that he included the autobiography “because maybe the lucky finder would want to know a little about the foolish person who abandoned such an opulent cache.” The printed text is so small, he wrote, that a magnifying glass is needed to read it.

With Fenn’s 24-line poem as their only clue, treasure hunters dedicated their lives to scouring the Rocky Mountains. Some searchers blew through their savings and abandoned their careers. One man served time in prison after he was caught at Yellowstone National Park. during their obsessive searches.

Stuef, then a 32-year-old medical student, found the treasure on June 6, 2020. Three months later, Fenn died at age 90.

For some Internet sleuths, the chase never truly ended. To this day, conspiracy theories abound online about how the chest was discovered.

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Forrest Fenn’s treasure could bring out the worst in people. Few know that better than journalist and former șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Podcast host Peter Frick-Wright, who first wrote about the late millionaire’s hidden chest—and the obsessives who searched for it—for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine in 2015.

That feature story, “On the Hunt for America’s Last Great Treasure,” wasn’t the first article on the hunt, but it seemed to set off a domino effect of reporting on the mystery, with lengthy deep-dives from , , , and , as well as a Cavalry Media podcast released in June, . Considering all the ink spilled over the sometimes-deadly hunt, one would be forgiven for wondering if there’s anything more to say about the eccentric art collector’s decade-long cat-and-mouse game.

But Frick-Wright’s new Apple Original podcast offers an intimate look at the chase and its human cost that only years of dedication to a story can provide—the sort of single-minded preoccupation that Fenn’s strongest devotees possess. The nine episodes follow the main subject of Frick-Wright’s 2015 story, ex-police officer and treasure hunter Darrell Seyler, who became homeless while attempting to crack the code to Fenn’s hidden fortune. Frick-Wright spent eight years reporting on the hunt for the treasure—including conversations with Fenn himself—all culminating in Missed Fortune, which has so far released five episodes since it premiered on August 15. (șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű is one of the producers of the series.)

For the uninitiated: the hunt began in 2010 when Fenn, a wealthy art dealer in New Mexico, hid a chest filled with gold and jewels somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, with only a 24-line poem hinting at its whereabouts. In pursuit of these riches, searchers depleted their life savings, tanked their marriages, and served prison time. Five people’s quests . The treasure was finally found by Jack Stuef, then a 32-year-old medical student, on June 6, 2020. Fenn died two months later, on September 7, 2020, at age 90. Conspiracy theories continue to proliferate online about just what really happened with the chest’s discovery, and a lawsuit accusing Fenn of moving the treasure is ongoing. Its plaintiff, Jamie McCracken, claims he has evidence that Fenn was still alive after his death was announced.

You don’t have to know any of this background on the treasure hunt to listen to Missed Fortune. The series lays it all out while illustrating how Fenn’s game became much bigger than him, and why so many people would risk everything they had just to solve a riddle.

While the actual pile of gems was surely enticing, for a lot of hunters, it wasn’t about the money—after all, Fenn had previously admitted not knowing how much the treasure was worth, despite estimates of $1 million to $5 million floating around in news reports. What Frick-Wright found, through his hours of conversations with Seyler, was that the hunt stood in for a set of intangible valuables—“belonging, purpose, accomplishment.”

“That stuff is water in the desert for Darrell—the pain and disappointment it brings, just drops in the ocean,” Frick-Wright says in the fourth episode. “So, there just won’t be any quitting. Not really. For Darrell, the only way out of this hunt is through it.”

Of course, someone else found the treasure before Seyler, who was by that time “just another risk-tolerant treasure hunter, a face in the crowd,” as Frick-Wright describes him. Now for Seyler and other former Fenn treasure hunters, the hunt is over, which is probably for the best.

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As she has for eight years, this search season,ÌęÌęheadedÌęinto the woods of Yellowstone National Park to look for the place Santa Fe art dealerÌęForrest Fenn hid a bronze chest full of gold and jewels over a decade ago. The thing is, by most accounts, the treasure is gone.

“We had such a trust with each other that we could talk about anything,” Meachum said of her friend, . But for as much time she spent with him, and as much as she knows about the eccentric Fenn, she doesn’t know the place he loved so much that it was where he hid his famous stash. While her chances at fame and fortune are gone, the opportunity to learn more about her late friend keeps Meachum venturing into the woods.

On June 6, 2020, Fenn announced his famed chest had been foundÌęby “a guy from out east,” who solved a poem in his memoir, Thrill of the Chase, full of clues to locate it. Most media outlets declared the million-dollar hunt over. A ÌęfromÌępeople who claimed that they were the rightful owners of the treasures followed. Facing the possibility he’d be outed in court, theÌęreal finder, Jack Stuef, a 32-year-old med student from Michigan, opted to come forward via an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌęarticle, though he would not reveal the exact location where he dug up the chest—only that it was retrieved in Wyoming. With no treasure to find and the winner finally revealed, the vast majority of people once interested in the decade-long story simply stopped caring. What’s a treasure hunt without its treasure?

But a core group of devoted hunters kept searching for the spot the treasure was once buried. Whether driven by a personal connection to Fenn, a desire for closure, or the pure excitement of trying to decipher the poem and explore the woods with their friends, for many searchers, Stuef’s refusal to say where and how he found the chest means the hunt continues.

And theÌęinternet sleuths dig deep. Fenn , , and are still flooded with solves based on emails Stuef sent about search techniques that worked for him. On Reddit, one hunter of more than 300 email conversations between searchers and Stuef, which grows every day. Another online sleuth built an algorithm that searched the most popular Fenn-based YouTube shows to see if anyone named “Jack” had been mentioned before Stuef’s name was revealed to the public. Using this method, he discovered Stuef had called into and emailed the YouTube show “A Gypsy’s Kiss” under the pseudonym Jack from Philadelphia, which provided even more material to comb through.

Mike and Kristy Cowling, a married couple who run two Fenn-themed YouTube shows and (THOR), a popular Fenn message board, say traffic is higher than it’s ever been. When asked whether the solution was worth more than the chest full of gold, Mike Cowling said, “I can’t say it’s more valuable, but I know there are searchers who would pay just as much for the solution.”

While some stick to internet clues, others believe boots-on-the-ground searching is a necessary part of finding the spot. and in subsequent emails, Stuef explained that Fenn’s original blaze (the final clue marker meant to alert searches that they had found the exact location) had been damaged by a sudden, natural event, which made it hard for him to recognize. Plus, he mentioned, someone created a fake blaze to throw off searchers around 1,000 feet away from the real one.

Clues like these led Meachum and her search partner, a 38-year-old software engineer named Justin Posey, on their annual trip to northwest Wyoming. As they follow trails and wander through the woods, they look for three tangible signs of the treasure’s former location: Fenn’s blaze, a fake blaze, and a divot. But the pair has one special advantage on their side. After reading about ore dogs that helped miners sniff out zinc, copper, and nickel, Posey got an idea. He trained his dog, Tucker, to smell out bronze in search of the treasure. And now, as they search for a divot instead of a chest, he’s relying on Tucker to sniff the soil for any lingering scent.

The abrupt ending to the treasure hunt, and the fact that it came just before Fenn’s death, has ledÌęsome to believe that their time would be better spent investigating Stuef’s story than where Fenn hid the treasure. Following a crowdsourced professional investigation into whether Stuef’sÌęchest photos were digitally manipulated, Kristy Cowling published a poll on THOR asking if Stuef was the finder. Nearly 30 percent of respondents answered “no” or that Stuef was a “proxy.”

One of the most popular conspiracy theories is that Stuef found the treasure on private property, somewhere tourists aren’t allowed to go, or in Yellowstone National Park, and can’t admit it lest he open himself up toÌęlegal questions around who the treasure really belongs to.

The other theory that’s gained the most traction is that Fenn sensed his life was coming to an end, but he didn’t want to burden his family with the hunt, which had stirred upÌęlawsuits, fatal accidents, and even a . So, goes the theory, Fenn opted to end the hunt by hiring Stuef,Ìęa former journalist with bylines in Buzzfeed, New York Magazine, and The Onion, and tipping him off to the treasure’s location.

In March 2021, Greg Alan, an inventor and Fenn YouTuber who runs the YouTube channel “Treasure Seekers, Brutal Truth,” conducted an in-person investigation to discover whether the Santa Fe office Stuef and Fenn said they’d met in was in fact a legitimate office in Santa Fe. Some people believe the photos of Stuef and Fenn were either PhotoshoppedÌęor took place in Wyoming. A week later, Alan appeared on the Cowlings’ YouTube show, “Forrest Fenn Treasure Found,”Ìęto outline his discoveries. , which confirmed that the Santa Fe office was a real office, quickly racked up 14,000 views.

Others, like David Woodard, a former law enforcement officer who creates videos under the name “” believe Stuef’s refusal to explain how he solved the poem stems from not having solved the poem. Woodard believes he followed and discovered Fenn’s blaze in New Mexico, but says he feared the professional ramifications if he was arrested for digging it up on public land. He believes Stuef was told the solve by people Woodard confided in about his own discovery, dug up the chest, and has been lying about it ever since.

As might be expected after years of examining a single poem for hidden messages, many conspiracies are based on a thorough investigation of the available texts. For example, Stuef’s email address to searchers, “jack85319834@gmail.com” anagrams to “Jack hid cache” using a basic A=1, B=2 code. Or that Fenn congratulated “the finder,” but never explicitly congratulated Stuef before he died. The nitpickiest of the nay-sayers will point to Fenn’s statement on dalneitzel.com, a now-closed Fenn-themed blog, that read “the finder understands how important some closure is for many searchers, so today [July 22] he agreed that we should reveal that the treasure was found in Wyoming.” The statement, they say, reads that Fenn said he and Stuef agreed to say it was in Wyoming, not that it actually was.

Online conspiracies like Pizzagate and QAnon have gone from message boards to armed men storming pizza shops and government buildings, so there’s a very real fear a searcher might go too far. Kristy Cowling said she’s had to take down personal information about Stuef and his family from her website. She views her YouTube channel and message board as a method to keep searchers and conspiracy theorists in places that are more positive and closely monitored and moderated than others. Still, she said Stuef told her that he’d have to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life.

Knowing the treasure hunting community well, she agrees “he absolutely will.”

If Stuef won’t reveal where he found the treasure, will the huntÌęever end? Kristy Cowling believes at least ten people—lawyers and family members—know the location, so it will come out eventually. But whether motivated by new clues, a personal relationship with Fenn, or the community itself, the searchers who still care aren’t likely to stop looking anytime soon.

“There are people who have devoted the last ten years of their lives to this thing,” Mike Cowling said, “and they’re not going to just let it go.”

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On May 4, 2020, with the pandemic turning his life upside down, 13-year-old Sebastian Morris needed a break. Bright and amiable, with long brown hair and wraparound shades, Sebastian lived in Santa Rosa Beach and enjoyed the usual Florida-boy fare—swimming, snorkeling, and hanging with his buddies, who nicknamed themselves the Tribe.

That morning, as Sebastian watched the rippling waves coming in at —more than 1,200 acres of shorefrontÌęand dunes just east of the town of Panama City Beach—he couldn’t wait to go diving with his dad, Bobby, a blond-haired 46-year-old who was loading up a rented pontoon boat.

Bobby had parlayed his passion for diving into a career as a commercial diver and remote-operated-vehicle pilot. The work is adventurous and challenging—he’d done everything from searching for a sunken helicopter to cleaning up after the British Petroleum oil spill. It’s also dangerous. One timeÌęwhile Bobby was torch-cutting an underwater structure damaged during Hurricane Katrina, he briefly got knocked unconscious by an explosion.

But what really captured Sebastian’s imagination were the treasures his father occasionally found on the job, including a 300-year-old ship heÌędiscovered in 2019, deep in the Black Sea near Turkey. “I was like, man, I kind of want to do that,” Sebastian says.

“All he’s ever wanted to be is a treasure hunter,” Bobby confirms. As they set out into the Gulf of Mexico, Sebastian imagined all the amazing things they might find.

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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.

A decade ago, Santa Fe art dealer Forrest Fenn filled a box with a box with treasure, placed it somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, then published a poem containing clues to its location.ÌęThousands of searchers would go looking for the loot, and five of them would die in the process before it was discovered last year. Nobody has followed this saga more closely than journalist Daniel Barbarisi, who broke the news of how the treasure was foundÌęand is now coming out with a book about the hunt, . In this episode, our former host, Peter Frick-Wright, who published his own feature about the chase in 2015, digs deep with Barbarisi on the story that captured the world.

This episode is brought to you by 303 protectants and cleaners, designed to take care of the vehicles you depend on for your adventures. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Podcast listeners get 20 percent off of all 303 products for a limited time at Ìęwhen they use the promo code OUTSIDE2021.

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