The Fenn treasure

Hidden in 2010, recovered in June 2020, worth about two million. The site was never disclosed

Forrest Fenn was a Texan, an Air Force pilot who won the Silver Star flying 328 combat missions in a year over Vietnam, and then a Santa Fe art and antiquities dealer whose gallery reportedly grossed $6 million a year. In 1988 he was told he likely had terminal cancer, and he decided to hide a treasure chest somewhere outdoors, perhaps as his own resting place, for people to hunt. He recovered. In 2010 he self-published a memoir, The Thrill of the Chase, and announced that he had hidden a small bronze chest, its sides carved with knights scaling walls, "in the mountains somewhere north of Santa Fe," and that a 24-line poem in the chapter "Gold and More" held nine clues to its place.

For more than a decade, he said, he had packed and repacked it: gold dust, hundreds of rare gold coins and nuggets, ancient animal figures, prehistoric mirrors of hammered gold, ancient Chinese faces carved in jade, antique jewellery with rubies and emeralds. He said he carried it to its hiding place alone, in two trips. Its worth was put as high as $2 million. Fenn said he wanted to tempt people out into the wilderness for an old-fashioned adventure, and hundreds of thousands went, across the mountains of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

The chase turned dark. Five people died searching. Randy Bilyeu vanished in 2016 and was found months later by the Rio Grande; a pastor, Paris Wallace of Grand Junction, was found miles downstream from the Taos Junction Bridge; Jeff Murphy fell some 500 feet in Yellowstone; Eric Ashby went into the Arkansas River in Colorado when his raft overturned; and Michael Sexson died near the Utah-Colorado border in 2020. The chief of the New Mexico State Police begged Fenn to call it off, saying he was putting lives at risk. Searchers were cited for digging under a roadside memorial cross and in a Yellowstone cemetery, one man broke into Fenn's home and tried to carry off a Spanish chest, and lawsuits accused Fenn of fraud. Fenn had his own brush with the law: the FBI raided his home in 2009 in an investigation into looting of artefacts in the Four Corners, though he was never charged.

In June 2020 Fenn announced that the chest had been found, in Wyoming, by a man from back East; he was later revealed to be Jack Stuef, a former journalist and medical student, who has refused to say where. He felt half glad, half sad, he said, that the chase was over. He died that September at 90. In December 2022 the contents sold at auction for $1.3 million.