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I don't think Forrest Fenn liked me very much.
He was an old man, 84 at the time, who in 2010 had hidden a chest full of gold coins and other valuables, written a poem full of clues to its location, and invited the world to go looking for it. I was a young writer, 29 at the time, who'd heard about his treasure hunt and driven across the country, from Oregon to New Mexico, to interview him.
Fenn was a first-rate collector, his study brimming with artifacts from Native American tribes, famous authors, and his favorite artists. I was a third-rate freelance journalist, mumbling something about a podcast when he asked where this interview would be published.
It was a chess match of a conversation. Fenn had a script that he stuck to. My job was to get him off of it. To Fenn, the treasure chest was an object that told a story—like any archeological find. But weren't archeological objects part of history? A cultural context? Wasn't his treasure hunt a little more, well, contrived? Did his treasure chest deserve the same attention?
"No, I don't deserve anything," he said. "But the Indian that left that Arrowhead there 10,000 years ago, did he deserve to leave that there for me to find 10,000 years later?"
In 2009, the FBI and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) raided Fenn's house looking for native artifacts collected illegally. They found nothing, but I'd talked to some of the people who'd investigated him. Did the treasure hunt have something to do with that? Sending people out onto BLM land as retaliation for the raid?
"I'm not going to talk about that investigation," he said.
Then what's this treasure hunt all about, deep down?
"The thrill is in the chase," he said. "The thrill is doing it."
Thanks for your time.
The pull of treasure is obvious, but I never really wanted to look for it. My interaction with Fenn left an aftertaste. I wasn't interested in playing his game.
But on the first day of journalism school they teach you not to walk away from a treasure hunt story. So after talking to Fenn, I reached out to the people looking for his treasure.
Following the treasure hunters
A former cop from Seattle, Darrell Seyler, had made the news for being swept down a river in Yellowstone while hunting for the chest. He had spent the night huddled on the riverbank before being rescued. Then he was banned from the National Park. He came back 12 days later, and again spent the night huddled on the riverbank. He was rescued again, then arrested.
I spent the next eight years following Darrell through his obsession, writing articles, recording for that podcast, waiting for an ending. I wondered what this treasure hunt was about, deep down. What was Darrell really looking for?
For a long time I waited for Darrell to quit the hunt and move on with his life. There were times he nearly did. After the arrest in Yellowstone, he lost his job and then his home. He moved his stuff into a storage unit, then lost the storage unit.
At one point, everything Darrell owned could fit into two duffel bags, which he threw in the back of a truck. On the way to go search for the treasure, the truck was stolen. He slept under a bridge and kept looking. The thrill was in the chase. The thrill was doing it.
Eventually, I did get sucked into the hunt. Sometimes I would lose whole days reading internet forums and piecing together clues. I called it "research," sometimes "fact-finding," but I knew the danger of pretending a treasure hunt was my job. I kept looking anyway.
For a while I thought I knew where it was, but when Darrell and I went to the location there was fresh snow on the ground, so we weren't able to search for it. By the time the snow had melted, I had decided not to go back. I realized I had been looking for a story, not a treasure, and I gave it up. It took Darrell a lot longer.
The hunt ended in 2020, when someone found Fenn's treasure. The finder won't say exactly where he found it, but we know it was in Yellowstone. Darrell had been close.
When a hobby becomes an obsession
Nearly everyone lost money looking for Fenn's treasure. For some it was a reasonable amount, for others it was more than they had to spend.
The treasure was said to be worth a million dollars. That amount of money justifies bad decisions, gives people a reason to bend the rules, break the law, even gamble their lives. Five people died on the hunt. For a while, people were calling on Fenn to end it, to go get the treasure and tell everyone to stop looking.
You'd think the most seductive part of a treasure hunt would be the money, but money is just an excuse to go on a treasure hunt. The main attraction is how straightforward everything becomes.
You know what to do with each day, each moment, when you're consumed with a hunt. Every time you go out searching you learn where it's not. Every day feels like progress. You can organize around it, and people understand. They may think you're crazy, stupid, or delusional but you don't have to explain the value of treasure to anyone. It can fill a gap in your life that you didn't even know was there.
A friend of mine was a real-life treasure hunter. He spent his twenties in libraries and nautical archives, comparing the incoming and outgoing manifests of 17th- and 18th-century British tall ships, looking for inconsistencies that might suggest valuable cargo on board. In 2007, the team he'd been on discovered a Spanish galleon containing 17 tons of mostly silver coins, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. After years in court, they gave it all back to Spain, the cargo's original owner.
The stories he tells are funny and sad, of men with romantic ideas about gold and jewels overcommitting to hunches and feelings, losing everything, then losing more. He got out of that life. He misses it.
Peter Frick-Wright is the host of the Apple Original Missed Fortune, about the Fenn treasure hunt, available August 15. He is a contributing editor at Outside magazine and hosted its podcast until 2020.
All views expressed in this piece are the writers' own.
