San Fe, New Mexico multimillionaire Forrest Fenn has always loved a good adventure. As a small child before eight, he and his brother, Skippy spent summer vacations making exploration in Yellowstone National Park.
As a teen, Fenn idolized the decorated World War Ⅱ fighter pilot, called Robin Olds and latter emulated his hero during the Vietnam War as an Air fighter pilot to go to New Mexico and settled there as an arts and antiques dealer, hunting down valuable paintings, rugs, war memorabilia, and other antique to sell.
In 1998, Fenn was diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer. As he had always been doing, he conceived a grand adventure that he assumed would be his last one. “I wanted to create some excitement, some hope, before I died,” says Fenn, 82, adding that he also wanted to “get kids out of the game room and off the couch.” With those ideas in his mind, he started to devise a treasure hunt.
Little by little, Fenn began stocking a small bronze chest with gold coins, prehistoric bracelets and other valuable things. When his cancer went into remission in 1993, he decided he would carry out his plan anyway.
In 2010, Fenn topped off the chest with jewels and valuable stones and hid it somewhere deep in the Rocky Mountains, north of Sante Fe. Later that year, he wrote a poem for his self-published memoir, The Thrill of the Chase. It contained nine clues about the treasure box’s whereabouts. One stanza reads like this: Begin it where warm waters halt/ And take it in the canyon down/ Not far, but too far to walk/Put in below the home of Brown.
A few months later, a story about the treasure appeared in a magazine. Since then, Fenn has received thousands of e-mails from treasure hunters. Some request more clues to the box. But mostly “people thanked me for bringing their family together,” he says with a self-comforting smile on his face. In April, Fenn told a crowd at an Albuquerque bookstore that two groups of treasure hunters had gotten within 500 feet of the chest. “They walked right by it,” he said.
Fenn is confident that the treasure will be unearthed eventually and says it will take the right combination of cunning and perseverance. “It will be discovered by someone who has read the clues carefully and successfully. But nobody is going to happen upon it,” he predicts.
He hopes that whoever finds the loot will relish the riches and the adventure of finding them.
