WILL TREASURE HUNTERS FIND OUT THE TRUTH?
Some looking for more info about the discovery of Forrest Fenn’s chest of gold
Forrest Fenn said in June his bounty was found, but he hasn’t offered many details.
Miriam DeFronzo learned Forrest Fenn’s treasure had been found while she was in a Texas hotel room a few hours outside of New Mexico, on the third day of a road trip west from Florida to search for the long-hidden bounty rumored to be worth $2 million.
It was the fourth time she’d struck out in search of the treasure chest, which Fenn, an eccentric New Mexico antiquities dealer, said in a self-published 2010 memoir he’d hidden somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Fenn, now 89, offered clues to the treasure’s location in a cryptic poem in that memoir, “The Thrill of the Chase.”
Over the last decade, thousands joined the hunt and at least four Colorado men died searching for the cache. Online communities of treasure hunters grew and flourished as thousands speculated on where the chest might be hidden. Searchers spent countless hours puzzling through clues and maps; some spent thousands of dollars or quit their jobs in the pursuit.
But on June 6, Fenn told the world the treasure chest had been found. The chase was over.
“I was dejected,” DeFronzo said. “We just turned around and headed back home.”
Now she — and thousands of others — want some answers.
Fenn posted photos of the treasure after it was found — the images show a chest filled with what appear to be gold coins, gold nuggets, jewelry and other valuable items. But he’s refused to say where the treasure chest was discovered or who found it, except that the man who discovered the chest was a stranger from “back East.”
The scarce details have left some treasure hunters feeling jilted, and prompted others to call the whole thing a hoax. Some believe the treasure was real and want to know how close they came, if they might have walked past the chest and just missed it. Some who spent years analyzing Fenn’s every word for hints to the treasure’s location are frustrated by his silence now. Anger boiled up in some of the online communities built around the hunt for Fenn’s treasure. Some searchers were just sad to see the quest end.
“You owe us something here, Forrest,” said Terry Kasberg, a Florida man who searched for the treasure for several years. “People have put thousands of hours into this, thousands. I mean day and night. People lived and breathed this thing for 10 years. And to cut everybody short like this is just so depressing for a lot of people.”
In an email Wednesday, Fenn declined an interview with The Denver Post.
The treasure hunters invested time, energy and money into the
search, and some likely formed their identities around the effort, said Ryan Curtis, senior instructor of psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“In the same way we would form an identity around our job or a relationship,” he said. “If someone dumps you, you often want to know why, because this is such a big part of how you identify yourself and how you think and feel. It’s over, but you still want to come to that closure and find out what is going on.”
Since Fenn’s blockbuster announcement, very few people have left a 4,300-member Facebook group dedicated to the hunt, said Janet Landgard, a former Colorado resident who started the group about three years ago.
She’s been searching for the treasure since 2012.
“Everybody is waiting to hear what Forrest is going to say next,” she said, adding that he once said whoever found the treasure should wait 30 days before doing anything with it — which could mean more information comes out around July 4.
She’s made friends through the group, she said, and built a tightknit community with fellow searchers, who sometimes met up in the real world as well as online.
“We’ve been through people’s cancer, we’ve helped with GoFundMe pages, when someone had a problem we were there for them,” she said. “One of our girls went through the California fires, and we ended up raising about $35,000, $40,000 for her to start over.”
Landgard called the quest a “fascinating adventure.” DeFronzo said she has no regrets about her trips to New Mexico in search of the treasure.
“We had the time of our lives,” she said. “We live in Florida, and our kids never saw mountains. We took them on two trips and they got to see mountains.”
She still hopes Fenn puts out more details, but speculated the handful of lawsuits that have been filed — such as one in which a Chicago woman claimed the person who found the treasure stole her solution — might stop him from doing so, at least immediately.
“I hope he doesn’t take his secret to the grave with him,” she said.
After the treasure was found, Landgard changed the name of her Facebook group from “Forrest Fenn’s Treasure Galore” to “Treasures Galore.”
She hopes to pivot the group to another treasure hunt — looking for some other bounty that has yet to be found.
“The hunt will go on,” she said. “And the Forrest Fenn treasure will be talked about for a long time.”