Front Burner - A riddle, a treasure hunt, and a mystery that may never end

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

Ten years ago, an eccentric Santa Fe art dealer named Forrest Fenn says he hid a treasure chest somewhere in the American Rocky Mountains – and then he wrote a poem with clues to tell people how to find it. Hundreds of thousands have tried. At least five have died on their search. And now, Fenn says the treasure has been found. But is the story really over? Today we’re joined by Robert Nott, a reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican who’s been on the Forrest Fenn beat for the past five years, and Zachary Crockett, a journalist who made a documentary for Vox about his own quest to find the Fenn treasure.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Josh Bloch. As I have gone alone in there, and with my treasures bold, I can keep my secret where, and head of riches new and old. In 2010, an eccentric antiques dealer from Santa Fe named Forrest Fenn says he took a little chest filled with $2 million worth of emeralds

and gold nuggets and centuries-old jewelry, and he hid it somewhere in the U.S. Rocky Mountains. There'll be no paddle up your creek, just heavy loads and water high. He wrote a poem that he said held the clues to where to find the treasure. And to make sure everyone knew about it, he published the poem in his memoir called The Thrill of the Chase. So hear me all and listen good. Your effort will be worth the cold.

If you are brave and in the wood, I give you title to the gold. And people went out and they looked for it. A lot of them. Fenn claims 350,000 people have scoured the Rockies looking for this tiny box. Five of them have reportedly died on the search. And I know that all sounds extreme, but I have to confess to you, I also became kind of obsessed with the idea of this treasure.

A couple years ago, I read The Thrill of the Chase, and I was fascinated by Fenn's riddle. with the idea of this treasure. A couple years ago, I read The Thrill of the Chase, and I was fascinated by Fenn's riddle, but also reading about this frenzied search for his hidden treasure, and the community of people trying to crack the code, sometimes together. Well now, after 10 years, Forrest Fenn says the treasure has been found.

Today, I'm talking to two people who have been following this story for a long time. And they're not totally convinced that this is the end of the hunt. Robert Knott is a reporter at the Santa Fe New Mexican, and he's been on the forest fen beat for the past five years. Zachary Crockett is a journalist based in San Francisco, and he and a colleague did a documentary for Vox a few years ago about their own quest to find the Fenn treasure. This is Frontburner. Hello to you both.

Hey, good morning. Zach, nice to meet you, man. Great job on the documentary. Thanks. Appreciate it. Appreciate all your reporting over the years, too. Yeah, I'm envious of you. You actually went out and looked for it. On the other hand, I'm kind of happy I didn't. Well, Robert, actually, I want to start with you because you might not have searched for it, but you have spoken to Forrest Fenn. For those who don't know this story, tell me a little bit like what is this riddle and and who is forest fenn uh forest fenn is a santa fe based arts and antiquities dealer retired former vietnam vet career u.s air force guy 20 years um born in texas um and he grew up hunting for his own kind of treasure arrowheads and such primarily up in the Yellowstone Park region where he was often taken on vacation. And he's a man who, by his own admission, didn't want to be

overlooked or just become a footnote, or as he put it, an asterisk in history. Ralph Lauren came to my house. We were standing in my library and I had something that he wanted. And he said, well, you have so many of those things. He said, you can't take it with you. I said, well, then I'm not going. So he came up with this idea of putting a lot of his antiquities into a chest and hiding it somewhere in the Rocky Mountain range of America. And actually, I understand that Fenn initially came up with this idea back in the late 80s. He was diagnosed with cancer. They gave me a one in five chance of living three years.

And am I right in saying the initial plan was he was going to walk out into this hiding spot with the chest and lay down next to it and die? Yeah, that was the late 80s. I think it was kidney cancer and he recovered from it. It was a great plan. The trouble with it was I got well. And it ruined the story. But the idea of hiding the treasure stayed with him.

So he waited until he was close to 80 years old and then says he took it out somewhere and hid it where it was within easy walking distance. But I don't think it was that easy. When I hid the treasure chest, I had to make two trips because the thing weighs 42 pounds. It's small, but gold is heavy. Well, it took a while for people to find it. What exactly is in this 12th century bronze chest? I think he's got a small Chinese bronze sculpture. He's got some Spanish coins, if I'm remembering correctly. There are hundreds and hundreds of gold nuggets.

Two of them are so large that they're the same size as a hen's egg. They weigh more than a pound apiece. Rubies, two beautiful Ceylon sapphires. There are eight emeralds. The media has reported that it's worth up to $2 million, but sometimes $700,000, $750,000. I'm not even sure if we know how much it always

totals up to, but I guess the guy who has it is figuring that out now. Right. And why do you think he did this? He wanted to be remembered. Now he's sort of going to be famous for a long time after he passes. He also

wanted people to get out and chase things in the wilderness. And I think there's some truth to that, the fact that so many people did show up to chase this elusive treasure. We have a problem in this world today, Carol, with our youth. And I blame parents for a lot of those problems.

I think they should get their kids out of the game room and off the couch and away from their little texting machines and get them out in the countryside, let them smell the sunshine. And indeed, I mean, hundreds of thousands of people took him up on this challenge and, you know, ventured off into the Rocky Mountains looking for this hidden treasure. Zach, give me a sense how people approach this riddle. There's allegedly nine clues that were hidden in this poem. And let's talk about what most people think of as the first two clues. Begin it where warm waters halt and take it in the canyon down.

Where did those first two clues, you know, send people off searching? Yeah, everyone. So my colleague Estelle and I, you know, we talked to more than a dozen treasure hunters and try to get into their psyche a little bit. Everyone just has a different solve to this. I mean, some people think where Warm Water's Halt is where the mouth of a river begins or ends. Home of Brown is probably one of the most interpretive clues in the poem. Some people think it's like literally a port potty somewhere, or like some kind of outhouse toilet. Other people more realistically think it's, you know, a mountain or a cabin.

Some folks get really deep into like, history, some get really deep into topography, geography, some get into religious symbiology, or even conspiracy theory territory. So it's incredibly interpretive. And it's really easy to get sucked down. Once you get locked into a theory, it's really kind of challenging to change someone's mind. Well, like one of the really tantalizing things to me was Forrest Fenn kept saying, all you need is the poem and a map. Like you don't need some kind of specialized knowledge. You don't have to be an expert code cracker. You just, it's all right there.

And a reasonably intelligent person could decipher the clues and figure out where to find it. Yeah, exactly. I, you know, he's been pretty cryptic over the years, but as Robert said, he's, he's dropped a few clues here and there. One of, one of the most important things he said is it's not in a place where an 80 year old man couldn't go bring, you know, 40 pounds of treasure chest and treasure. And a lot of people seem to ignore that. A lot of treasure hunters will traverse deep into the wilderness, go into caves, climb up mountains, ford across

rivers, things like that, get themselves into trouble. And he said it's somewhere between like 5,000 feet and 10,200 feet. And it's probably somewhere in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, or New Mexico. So that limits the geographical territory a little bit, but it's still a vast swath of wilderness that can be very unforgiving for people who don't really know how to operate out there. Well, yeah, and just tell me a little bit more about that landscape. I mean, you spent some time out in the Rockies. What's it like? It's gorgeous. You know, Yellowstone National Park is one of the country's treasures. But it's also the kind of place where if you veer off the trail a little bit too far, it's very easy to get lost. Most people who get

lost in the wilderness in the United States don't venture that far off of a trail. They, you know, maybe go 10, 20, 50 feet, 100 feet off a trail. They get disoriented and they get turned around, they get lost. And at the wrong time of year, it can be pretty devastating, the consequence. This is the moment Estelle and I began to question our sanity. There's definitely a promising cave down there. I don't know if it's a bear den. We realized very quickly that despite these cute pictures of bears in Yellowstone, they are very dangerous. That would be 10 miles of walking for Forrest Fenn and about 12 to 1600 feet of elevation gain. Many people post their

solves for the poem on to blogs and onto Facebook groups. And to your point about this kind of selection bias, I mean, I've read the solutions and they look really convincing to me. You know, once you read it, you think, sure, that has to be it. I mean, all the answers really seem to line up and direct you to one specific hiding spot. And then you read someone else's solve and it just feels as equally convincing. Yeah. I mean, you know, in one of our theories that we had taken from this poet in Scotland with his permission, you know, he had this interpretation that heavy loads in water high, which is a big clue in the poem. He went way back in history and he found back in 1959, there was this massive earthquake that caused the Hebgen Lake dam to give way.

And it resulted in these like massive landslides that killed 28 people. And it was this huge tragedy. And he thought that heavy loads in water high was a reference to that disaster. And, you know, it just seems like it seems like it fits so well, because it's in it's in exactly in the kind of territory you'd expect a guy like Fenn to hide treasure. It's this beautiful picturesque landscape. And and then you have this clue that, like heavy loads in water high was like literally language that was used in, in like writing about this tragedy and old news reports. So like, yeah, there, there are so many rabbit holes you can go down and get stuck in.

In the dragon's den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years.

I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Robert, I went a short way down the rabbit hole, certainly looking online at the really active

community of people that have been searching for forest hidden treasure. And these blogs and places that people are actually almost crowdsourcing the challenge and getting people to weigh in and kind of collectively come up with solutions. Tell me a little bit about that community of treasure hunters. Who are they? I think I found out the same thing that Zach found out, which is to a large degree, they're a tightly knit group that want to help each other to a certain degree. If they figure out a clue,

they might share it. I wonder sometimes if they didn't have some offline deals where somebody, you know, Treasure Hunter 1 agreed with Treasure Hunter 4 that even though they don't know each other, since they're sharing tips, if one of them finds it, they'll split the treasure. There's gonna be a lot of sub stories we'll never get to the bottom to. And they seem to mostly work

together. Although sometimes, you know, you can see them getting snippety with one another. I wonder, Zach, was that your same sort of feeling from them? I'd be really curious to see the, I bet you, you and I get emails from a lot of the same types of people. But yeah, you know, like Robert said, I get probably 10 emails a week from people who a lot of a lot of the hunters right now, think that the treasure was already previously found. They also a couple think the timing is really odd, given that at least the fourth or fifth person died looking for it just a few months ago. Robert has written about some of the troubles that Fenn has faced with lawsuits and people breaking into his home even.

David Hanson is now suing Fenn, saying he's been duped. He says he followed clues from the book and arrived at the area where he believes the treasure is hidden, but says additional clues from Finn threw him off, calling them conflicting with the original clues. Finn filed a counterclaim. Court documents say both sides have agreed to drop their cases. You know, I think the theory has been floated that maybe Finn is just tired

and he wants this to be over with. And some people believe that he is kind of just, he's found a way to end this hunt prematurely or that he, you know, is in cahoots with someone else. There's all kinds of interesting theories floating around. Yeah, yeah. You know, not so much a setup, but maybe he fed a few more clues to someone who was the closest to end it 10 years. I think it would have been this summer, 10 years. Yeah, yeah. was the closest to end it 10 years. I think it would have been this summer, 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that Forrest Fenn hasn't, even though he's not disclosing who has found the hidden treasure, he's also not telling us where it was hidden and what the

actual correct solve was to the poem. And that's annoying a lot of people on my end. Are you finding that too, Zach? Exactly. Exactly. You don't have to tell us who got it because most of them have told me they would have remained anonymous because they don't want the trouble, whether it's income tax trouble or whose land was it on that might say, I have a claim to that property. Hey, you hid it on private land, but the people still want to know. Fine. Tell us where it was and what the clues mean. Zach, are you getting that? Yeah, they totally, most of the treasure hunters seem to be totally fine with the anonymous nature of it.

They would do the same thing, many of them. But like Robert said, what they're angry about is that there's no information on where it was found, even the state or the general region. And again, I think that's because they want some kind of confirmation that they were right. They're still convinced they're right. They're convinced that once the true location of this is revealed, their solve was correct, some of them. But yeah, they're furious about the lack of information around the solve. Sasha, has it sunken for you yet that the search for this buried treasure is, I guess, finally over?

I called Forrest Fenn and verified myself and he said it was found and I believe him. But he does say he will be releasing photos soon. So we, the public, should be getting some proof that at least someone has the treasure chest. Well, I could imagine why Fenn might want to end the hunt for this treasure. There's been five deaths that have been reported of people looking for it.

Robert, tell me a little bit about, I know that you have reported on this, tell me a little bit about the people that have lost their lives looking for this treasure. The one I covered was Randy Bilyeu, B-I-L-Y-E-U. He disappeared from a raft. His dog was found alive in New Mexico. His ex-wife, Linda Bilyeu, had been part of the search team. Do you think there's a chest at all? No, I don't.

I don't hold him responsible for Randy deciding to go on this adventure because Randy is an adult. But I do feel that Randy's mind was manipulated into believing that he knew exactly where he was going. There was a guy named Jeff Murphy who died up there by Yellowstone. Eric Ashby was a guy who died in the Arkansas River up in Colorado. I think the most recent one was a guy near the Utah-Colorado border, Michael Wayne Sexton,

who was in his early 50s. So you get off the trail and suddenly this territory is enveloped in very unexpected weather. You find yourself freezing to death, lost, disoriented, dying of exposure, drowning. And this happened. And Fenn all along kept saying, people have to be better prepared when they go in the wild. People have free will. It's their decision to go out there.

I'm not going to stop the search just because of this. It weighs on you. A little bit. I don't feel responsible. I don't feel like I'm to blame for any of those things that happened. Was it the fifth death that made an end to this? Was it the third lawsuit? Was it, you know,

Fenn hoping nobody bangs on the door anymore and says, I know the treasure's in your house, let me in. Was it legitimate? I'm assuming there was a treasure, but I can't submit a public records request for that. Neither can Zach. But it does leave a lot of big question marks. Well, Robert, you just mentioned some other consequences that Forrest Fenn faced for

hiding this treasure. You also covered a story that involved Fenn and his daughter holding someone at gunpoint. Can you tell me about that? There was a guy from the East Coast who believed that the treasure, based on his examination of the clues, was on Fenn's home property. So this guy broke in an outside gate and made his way into a guest house. And he got a box of linens. And Fenn and his daughter, his adult daughter, one had a handgun, one I think had a shotgun. They kept the guy at bay, called the police.

The police came and arrested the man. The officer continues to ask Miller why he targeted Fenn's home. So you came on the property because of a fellow? Are you serious? Yeah. You weren't here to break into anything? I was taking that box of clothes right there, like the poem said. The officer then broke it to Miller that his treasure hunt is a crime. Here's the thing, man. That's a burglary, dude.

So again, that was sort of another unfortunate byproduct of this all, the lengths to which people would go to get their hands on treasure. Zach, as a treasure hunter now yourself, how do you feel now learning that this may have been found? I'm kind of sad. I kind of imagine myself someday with my kids going out there and searching for the treasure. But,

um, I think one of the most important things that's been mentioned so far is, is what Robert opened the conversation with, which is that, you know, this is as journalists, we, we don't,

none of this can still be confirmed. We don't, the entire treasure could still be a conjecture. It could be. Um, so like, um, it's just he may never have have hidden the treasure in the first place well yeah it's possible i mean you know nothing has really been confirmed i i think we'd all like to to believe in the fairy tale story of someone some eccentric guy hiding a treasure chest which could very well be true but we also don't know if it's if it's not true so part of you has to just believe that

this whole thing is real um there is an element of blind faith involved in the hunt and i think we want to believe which is why we're doing this radio show yeah definitely i mean the the whole the whole project this whole rid riddle and the hiding of the treasure and the hundreds of thousands of people that have gone to look for it, it has always struck me as a kind of social experiment. You know, what happens if you put $2 million out in the Rocky Mountains and tell people that they can go find it? I'm wondering for you, Zach, what does this story do you think say about the times that we're living in now? Like, is there some kind of bigger metaphor here about what this treasure hunt

inspired? I think the bigger metaphor lies in the human psychology of it, which is, you know, the confirmation bias, like the fact that we'll just, we can come up with a theory in our own head, and convince ourselves that it's airtight, that it's correct, and no, and everyone else is wrong. The hundreds of thousands of other people who've searched for this treasure and come up with theories are all wrong, and you're right. And there's no way that anyone can convince you otherwise. I think there's also, you know, just a tremendous thirst for mystery. I mean, we're, we're, we're in an age where not to reach too much, but we're in an age where information can be googled. Most, most things are at our fingertips. Science has answered a lot of major questions that we have. And like, I think there's a thirst for mystery, a thirst for the unknown.

I think a lot of people were drawn to that. And for most people I talked to, the money was kind of the last thing on their mind. You know, his story about surviving a terminal kidney cancer diagnosis really inspired me in my own health struggles. And now just being able to go out there and follow in his footsteps too. I'm so proud to be able to go out and do it. It was more about the, you know, as Fen has said, it's the thrill of the chase. And I think that's also what drew me in. But I'm sure I wouldn't mind, you know, $2 million in gold coins either. Robert, what do you think?

Well, you know, it's funny because Zach and I have never met, but I already feel like I know him and I suspect we'll be in touch. And I think that's a large part of it. People got to know one another. But I liked everything Zach said, and I can't help but wonder projecting upon other people, mind you, whether people as they were searching, seriously searching, repeatedly searching, didn't find out something about

themselves out there in the wilds, in the wilderness. I'm still not so certain, had the treasure quote unquote never been found, that people would have given up. They had something to chase, and now someone's taking that away from them. And that's a lot of people for me to try to figure out how to get into the mines of, but chasing something, even if, even if you don't know where it is or whether you're going to get it. And in doing so, maybe learning something about yourself, Robert and Zach, thank you so much.

It was a pleasure. Thanks for having us. Thanks. Zach, stay in touch. Yeah, definitely. And before I let you go today, some COVID-19 news to get you caught up on. Prime Minister Trudeau pledged to extend the Canada Emergency Response Benefit,

aimed to help those Canadians unable to return to work. The CERB was set to expire early July, as the majority of the 8 million applicants are about to use up their $8,000 limit. Trudeau did not give details about the proposed extension, though he did say the government would not abruptly cut people off. However, the president of the Treasury Board said that because the economy has begun to reopen in many parts of the country, there will be new parameters for those hoping to qualify. More details are set to come out later this week. That's it for today. I'm Josh Bloch. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.