Chronicles the ill-fated search for Fenn’s Treasure : NPR

Forrest Fenn was rich, and he had a flair for the dramatic. So he announced in 2010 that he had hidden a box of “treasure,” made up of gold and jewels, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. He convinced a significant number of people to dedicate years of their lives to trying to find this box, looking for clues in a cryptic poem he included in his memoir with lines like, “If you are brave and in the wood / I give you title to the gold.” He went on television every so often to drop a hint, and he relished the online community of people frantically using every bizarre technique you can imagine to decode the poem.

People died looking. People gave up their jobs. They spent a lot of money. This is all published history and thus not a spoiler, but if you want to know how it turned out, here you go: After about 10 years, shortly before he died, Fenn announced that the treasure had been found, and despite early vagueness about the details, his family eventually produced the “finder” – a medical student. But Fenn never said exactly where the treasure had been hidden (though he said it had been in Wyoming) or explained how the clues in the poem would have led anyone there.

A searcher named Justin Posey, who features heavily in the new Netflix docuseries Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure, ultimately found a spot that he decided must have been the correct location, and much of the community of searchers now treats that as the solution. The treasure, meanwhile, was sold at auction.

Justin Posey was one of the searchers for Fenn’s Treasure.

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The series treats this story as quirky and charming, a tale of eccentric go-getters in the American West. It focuses on a handful of the “searchers,” including Posey, none of whom ever found anything.

Their stories can be sad: One family describes years of backbreaking work to pursue a single theory about where the treasure was. They hoped to get money to help a family member with a disability. One guy took his wife and his kids along, and in every clip he shows, one of his kids looks miserably bored.

Searchers can seem unkind: Cynthia Meachum, one of the best-known searchers who became close with Fenn, says in the series that when people started dying, she was really worried — about the treasure hunt being called off. After all, she says, “S*** happens.”

In the series, it falls to a single journalist, New York Magazine‘s Ben Wallace, to offer any skepticism about Fenn or the hunt. Wallace’s feature about Fenn, first published in 2020, explains why he wasn’t sure Fenn’s claims should be taken at face value. It also points out discrepancies in Posey’s proposed solution spot in Yellowstone that the series doesn’t mention.

There’s something … gross, honestly, about a rich person dangling money in front of people, telling them to go chase it through water and over mountains and through freezing temperatures. Egging them on, lapping up the attention, and then blaming them for bad outcomes, as Fenn did when he said that there are rules for being in the Rockies, and people don’t typically have to be told that. “There are always exceptions, and they learn the hard way,” he said.

Forrest Fenn died in 2020 at age 90.

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The series seems to share his impulse to blame searchers for any problems. After all, it’s called Gold & Greed. But is it really greedy to look for a reward that you are explicitly offered? Does a rich guy get to throw money into the wilderness, send people after it, make himself famous, and then when they waste their time or suffer or die trying to figure out his little poem like they’d analyze an episode of The White Lotus, be absolved because they shouldn’t have been greedy enough to do what he told them to do?

Maybe the most striking and timely thing about the series, though, is that it shows how amateur sleuths, over and over, put together long “solves” based on “evidence” that sounded convincing to them but were ultimately nothing. Over and over, what someone found convincing — what they did their own research to conclude, what made them yell EUREKA! — was just wrong, even if it sounded right. And it never slowed them down. To this day, it sounds like nobody is really sure how, or if, that poem could have been cracked to get to the right answer.

Perhaps rich people waving money around and asking people to perform feats in order to get some of it is not a great idea. Perhaps it’s worth walking outside in the mountains, even without the promise of wealth. And perhaps a story about such losses for one man’s amusement isn’t all that charming.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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