Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He Hid $2 Million Dollars in The Mountains - The Forrest Fenn Treasure Hunt

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

In 2010, art dealer and memoirist Forrest Fenn hid a bronze chest containing gold, jewels, and rare artifacts—worth over $1 million—in the Rocky Mountains of the United States. He embedded nine cryptic clues in a 24‑line poem published in his memoir The Thrill of the Chase, inviting the public into an epic, decade‑long treasure hunt that drew more than 300,000 searchers and sadly resulted in five deaths.

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After three months, plan auto renews and 1299 a month, terms apply. So there's a treasure chest worth about $2 million buried somewhere in the mountains. And about 300,000 people are about to try and find it. It all starts with this guy. His name's Forrest, and Forrest is 58 years old, living in New Mexico. And bro, he's kinda like a real-life Indiana Jones. He finds and trades and sells precious artifacts from around the world. He actually runs a little art gallery in New Mexico. But one day in 1988, his whole life falls apart.

Because he's diagnosed with terminal cancer. And the doctors tell him that he only has a 20% chance of living the next three years. And this really sucks for him. He doesn't know what he's gonna do. So, being the eccentric guy that he is, he decides he's gonna die with some of his valuable artifacts. He apparently wants to inspire people to get out and explore. You know, like maybe once he dies,

they'll find him out there and they'll find the treasure. And so he gets started on this plan. He goes and he buys a special box and he fills it with $2 million worth of valuable artifacts that he's collected over the years, like some gold nuggets, some ancient Chinese carved jade figures, an ancient gold ring, a gold bracelet, stuff like that. Then he maps it all out.

That he's going to take that box into the Rocky Mountains with him and he'll find a nice place to lay down with it and he'll basically just die with it, I guess. However, that doesn't actually happen because he ends up getting better and he beats the cancer. I guess it goes into remission. And he's so happy and he's so relieved that he can keep on living. And so fast forward to 2010. And Forrest is 80 years old now.

And he's approaching what might be his final years again. And so he starts thinking about his old plan again to get people out exploring and living a life of adventure like he's. did. And so this time he decides to hide his treasure box with two million dollars worth of artifacts in it somewhere in the Rocky Mountains and he's going to turn it into an old fashion treasure hunt, thinking maybe this will inspire people to become, you know, treasure hunters. So he hikes up into the mountains to the spot where he planned on dying all those years ago and he buries the chest in a place that's in Yellowstone National Park. Then he writes and publishes his memoir called The Thrill of the Chase.

And in it, he talks about his life, but it also includes hints and clues about where this treasure is throughout the whole book, specifically in a poem he wrote that he says will lead anyone to the treasure. So now, boom, the hunt is officially on. And pretty quickly, word of this treasure hunt starts to get around, and people are like, yo, there's $2 million treasure buried somewhere in Rocky Mountains. And they all start looking for it. Tens of thousands of people start looking for it.

They're all like picking up his memoir, they're combing through it, looking for clues, they're analyzing the hell out of that poem that he wrote, and eventually some of them even use like some kind of software to analyze Forrest's facial expression in TV interviews to maybe get some hints from that. And over the years, the amount of people who join this treasure hunt grows and grows. Supposedly, somewhere around 300,000 people are actively involved in.

involved in this. But still, no one has even come close to finding it. And here's the thing, though. Searching in remote areas of the mountains actually gets really dangerous for some people. One person ends up falling off a 500-foot cliff, another person drowns while in a raft looking for this treasure. In fact, at least five people unfortunately die from being involved in this. It gets so bad that New Mexico police publicly call for forests to call off the treasure hunt because it's putting lives at risk. But of course, Forrest is like, no. Because this is exactly what he wanted. He wanted people to get out and explore. But even still, at this point, no one is even getting close to finding this $2 million treasure. Until... Until something kind of crazy happens.

One day in 2018, this guy is scrolling on Twitter. His name is Jack. Jack, he's just Just a regular chill dude, he's around 30 years old. Jack's scrolling through Twitter one day and he stumbles across people talking about forest treasure hunt. And he sees that this hunt has been going on for like eight years at this point, yet no one has located the treasure. And he's like, $2 million, I gotta get in on that. Here's the problem though. Jack, he's not an Indiana Jones type. He's actually a former med student. He doesn't know how to treasure hunt. He's never done anything like that before. But he's a pretty smart guy. he believes he has the ability to figure this out. So he gets to work and he starts reading tons of

blogs that other people have posted on the internet, blogs by people who have been out looking for this treasure. And he can see which locations they've already been searching and like things that they've already tried, stuff like that. Then he gets a copy of Forrest's memoir and he reads it over and over and over again. And he watches every single interview that Forrest has ever done, Every word Forrest has ever said, everything Forrest has ever published, Jack has studied it, meticulously. And soon he starts to notice that Forrest,

he's not all that sophisticated of a guy. He's actually not embedding hidden secret meanings and double entendres in his writing. He's way more simple than that. And all the other treasure hunters out there are probably way overthinking it. Then he decides to go solo. Once he actually goes to the mountains and starts hunting,

He doesn't engage with anyone else who's also looking for the treasure. He doesn't join their search parties or their social groups. He even starts avoiding the blogs because he doesn't want to get caught up in what a big group might think. And so Jack searches, and he searches, and he searches. And, you know, this isn't easy for the guy. Like, it takes up a good chunk of his time. Every time he goes out into the wilderness to look, he's absolutely exhausted and he gets covered in scratches and bites. Some days he'll run out of water and have to quit.

Some days he'll be searching in the woods and he'll just stop and sit down in the middle of nowhere and start crying out of sheer frustration. And he loses hope all the time. He's like thinking to himself, what if I can't ever find this treasure? What if 50 years go by and I'm still searching for this stupid treasure chest? But Jack doesn't want to give up quite yet. He keeps going and two years go by. And Jack is 32 now.

He's still out there looking for this thing. And then one day, he finally has kind of a breakthrough. Using his big brain, he had already figured out the general location of where the treasure might be, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. But now he thinks he knows the exact spot. This is it! He says this is the spot where Forrest wanted to die. And so after 25 days of looking for the treasure in that specific location, Jack finally finds

it. And then he drives from Wyoming all the way down to New Mexico where Forrest lives, and he lets Forrest know that he found the chest. And you know, Forrest is all happy. And so Forrest goes and he announces publicly that the chest has been found. And other people who have been looking for the treasure chest get super pissed. And they accuse Forrest of never really hiding the treasure in the first place. And this is an inside job.

And they claim that no one really found the treasure forest just wanted to end the hunt. And then, of course, people start filing lawsuits against him. He also, at one point, this poor guy is getting stalkers. He starts getting death threats. People were starting to break into his home, thinking that he had the treasure hidden there. It is wild. But anyway, a few months after the treasure is found,

Forrest ends up passing away at 90 years old. Here is a picture of him with some of the treasure. And a few years after that, Jack actually auctions off the contents of the chest for $1.3 million. And here's what the treasure box looked like in real life. That's not really looking all that special, is it?