After the chase, some less-than-thrilled treasure seekers on hunt for closure
With Fenn refusing to disclose location where chest was hidden, found, many who thought they had solved riddle have unanswered questions
Where Forrest Fenn’s treasure lay buried for 10 years remains a mystery almost a month after it was reportedly unearthed.
To some, this glaring gap in the denouement would be like a fictional detective declaring a murder solved without identifying the killer.
It tantalizes, angers and has even spurred a recent lawsuit.
Fenn, an eccentric 89-year-old art dealer and Vietnam War veteran, has refused to divulge the finder’s name or where in the Rocky Mountains he had stashed the 20-pound trove purportedly worth as much as $2 million.
Frustrated fortune seekers care far more about the location than the finder, who Fenn says is from “back East.”
Many are certain they had deciphered Fenn’s key clues and were closing in on the cache but that it was snatched away from them by the mystery hunter or, more nefariously, by someone Fenn sent to foil their impending triumph.
“He’s not giving up where it is, and that’s what is eating at me,” said Bob Hosko, an Albuquerque
resident. “People want closure.”
Among those still obsessing about the undisclosed site are self-described “solvers” who never roamed the countryside searching for the fabled treasure but want to know if they cracked the code.
During a brief phone call, Fenn didn’t explain why he refuses to identify the place that once held the chest of coins, ancient artifacts and other loot.
Hosko and others are convinced they had pinpointed the spot by matching geographical features with clues in a poem that Fenn wrote as part of his autobiography, The Thrill of the Chase.
Yet they cite different locations in multiple states.
Hosko said the clues put the treasure in an area past the Santa Fe ski basin. The poem refers to 10,200, the elevation of the resort’s parking area, he said, adding the number is too precise to be coincidence.
The second clue is the resort’s brown welcome sign that goes with the stanza referring to “the home of Brown.”
Hosko said he explored the area but didn’t cross a stream, which he determined later was an error. He decided to go back in the spring. Months later, he emailed Fenn describing where he had gone and that he planned a return trek the next week.
Three days later, the treasure was discovered.
Hosko said he regrets emailing Fenn, who he suspects sent someone up the mountain to seize the treasure.
“It took me down hard,” Hosko said. “I always put boots on the ground. I was out there. Now I try to mentally block it out and say, ‘Bob, you had some fun.’ ”
The quest for the fabled treasure inspired an estimated 350,000 people to explore mountainous sites from New Mexico to Montana. It also drew a few lawsuits.
Fenn recently filed a written response to a May lawsuit filed by Brian Erskine, an Arizona man who believes he tracked the treasure’s location without ever physically visiting the spot.
In the lawsuit, Erskine claims Fenn broke a written contract — in the form of the poem — by not awarding him the treasure when he learned the whereabouts. But Fenn’s attorney counters there was no written contract and that a hunter uncovered the treasure far from the Colorado site where Erskine claimed it to be.
“Everybody thinks they know where it’s at,” Hosko said. “People were looking up in Yellowstone and Colorado. That’s not where it is.”
One searcher, Boyd Hill of Irvine, Calif., says Fenn’s poem weaves in Norse legends, pointing to a site near Gardiner, Mont.
The “home of the Brown” refers to the area’s electrical lines that commonly have brownouts or reductions in power, Hill said. “Marvel gaze” alludes to a Marvel Comics Nordic horse symbolizing a landscape feature and hints at the direction you must go, he said.
Like others who have claimed to have solved the puzzle, Hill offers an elaborate interpretation of what the poem really means.
“I think it’s so dead-on that it’s hard to refute,” Hill said. “Understanding the overlay of the Norse legend — it becomes clear.”
Hill said he visited the site but failed to make one vital leg of the journey. He believes he might have crossed paths with the man who eventually found the hidden cache.
Hill also thinks Fenn would like to identify the site but is respecting the finder’s wish not to do so yet.
But as long as Fenn refuses to reveal the site, people will suspect the whole thing is a charade, said Bill Dyrud of Greeley, Colo.
“Some people are mad; they think it’s all a hoax now,” Dyrud said.
Dyrud said he studied the poem for three months and drew a map based on a few verses.
He pegged the spot as 800 feet from the Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming and was preparing to travel there when Fenn announced the trove was found, he said, calling it “frustrating.”
Dyrud said he has wondered at times whether it was a hoax, but he also thinks the photos of the discovered treasure are convincing.
Although it would be interesting to know exactly where the treasure was hidden, it’s probably best that Fenn keeps it a secret to avoid drawing crowds to the place, Dyrud said.
“They’ll have problems,” Dyrud said. “They should never say where it was.”