For ten years a single poem sent people into the backcountry of four Western states. Its author, Forrest Fenn, was a Santa Fe art and antiquities dealer and a former Air Force fighter pilot who had flown hundreds of combat missions over Vietnam. He said he had loaded a small bronze box with gold nuggets, old coins, gemstones and jewelry, carried it into the mountains alone, and left it where a clever reader could find it.
What happened
Fenn put the poem in The Thrill of the Chase, a memoir he published himself in 2010. Its 24 lines begin with the poet going “alone in there” and then steer the reader toward a spot “where warm waters halt,” a canyon, a home of Brown and a blaze. He said the verses held nine clues and that the rest of the book carried hints. His only firm geography was that the box sat in the Rocky Mountains somewhere north of Santa Fe, in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming or Montana. Estimates of its value ran from one to three million dollars.
Fenn told interviewers that the idea dated to 1988, when a cancer diagnosis convinced him he had little time left and he pictured going out to the spot to die beside the box. He recovered, and in old age decided to hide it anyway. Over the next decade he answered searchers by email and on a fan blog run by Dal Neitzel, dropping small extra hints. Fenn himself put the number of people who went looking in the hundreds of thousands, a figure nobody could check.
The deaths
The search was supposed to be safe. Fenn said repeatedly that an elderly man had walked to the hiding place and back, and that nobody needed to climb or swim. Searchers took risks anyway. Randy Bilyeu of Broomfield, Colorado, vanished in New Mexico in January 2016; workers found his remains near the Rio Grande that summer, and the cause of death could not be fixed. In June 2017 Jeff Murphy of Illinois died after a fall of about 500 feet in Yellowstone. The same month Paris Wallace, a pastor from Grand Junction, failed to meet his family after a search near the Taos Junction Bridge; his body was found downstream on the Rio Grande. Two weeks later Eric Ashby went into the Arkansas River in Colorado when a raft overturned, and remains recovered weeks afterward were identified as his in January 2018. In March 2020 Michael Sexson of Deer Trail, Colorado, died after he and a companion were stranded on snowmobiles near Dinosaur National Monument.
After Wallace died, Pete Kassetas, chief of the New Mexico State Police, said publicly that Fenn should call the hunt off because it was putting lives at risk. Fenn weighed ending it and chose to keep it going, offering safety advice instead. Others were rescued from canyons or arrested for digging in protected ground, including a man who dug in a historic cemetery in Yellowstone.
The find
On June 6, 2020 Fenn told Neitzel’s blog that the chest had been found and that the poem had led the finder to the exact spot. He named neither the person nor the place, and many searchers suspected a stunt. In July he said only that it had been in Wyoming. Fenn died in Santa Fe that September, aged 90.
The finder posted photographs and an unsigned account on Medium. In December 2020 a lawsuit brought by a searcher who believed her own solution had been stolen pushed him into the open. Writing in Outside, the journalist Daniel Barbarisi named him as Jack Stuef, a 32-year-old medical student from Michigan, and Fenn’s grandson Shiloh Old confirmed it. Stuef denied the hacking claim and said the chest had been nowhere near New Mexico. In 2022 a declaration filed in a separate case by Yellowstone’s chief ranger, Sarah Davis, said Fenn and Stuef had described the site to her over a video call in August 2020, which placed it inside the park. The government asked the court to keep the details sealed so crowds would not trample an undeveloped area. Much of the jewelry and gold was later auctioned.
Where it stands
The chest was real, it held what Fenn said it held, and it came out of the ground in Wyoming in June 2020. What remains uncertain is how. Stuef has never published his solution or the precise location, so outsiders cannot test whether the nine clues truly lead there, and lawsuits arguing that Fenn moved the box or rigged the ending went nowhere in court. The hunt is over; the poem is still argued about, and at least five people died chasing it.