Collector’s $1 million treasure chest found
SANTA FE, N.M. — A bronze chest filled with gold, jewels and other valuables worth more than $1 million and hidden a decade ago somewhere in the Rocky Mountains has been found, according to a famed art and antiquities collector who created the treasure hunt.
Forrest Fenn, 89, told the Santa Fe New Mexican on Sunday that a man who did not want his name released — but was from “back East”
— found the chest a few days ago and the discovery was confirmed by a photograph the man sent him.
“It was under a canopy of stars in the lush, forested vegetation of the Rocky Mountains and had not moved from the spot where I hid it more than 10 years ago,” Fenn said on his website Sunday that still did not reveal the location.
Fenn posted clues to the treasure’s whereabouts online and in a 24-line poem that was published in his 2010 autobiography “The Thrill of the Chase.”
Hundreds of thousands have hunted in vain across the West for the chest. Many quit their jobs to dedicate themselves to the search and others depleted their life savings. Four people died searching for it.
Fenn, who lives in Santa Fe, said he packed the chest for more than a decade, sprinkling in gold dust and addingrare gold coins and gold nuggets. Pre-Columbian animal figures went in, along with prehistoric “mirrors” of hammered gold, ancient Chinese faces carved from jade and antique jewelry with rubies and emeralds.
He said he hid the treasure as a way to tempt people to get into the wilderness.
Fenn told The New Mexican in 2017 that the chest weighs 20 pounds and its contents weigh another 22 pounds.
Asked how he felt now that the treasure has been found, Fenn said: “I don’t know, I feel halfway kind of glad, halfway kind of sad because the chase is over.”