[adventurous music playing]
[man 1] It's just got a lot of the elements you want in a good story.
It has the romance. The stakes are high.
It appeals to everybody's sense of adventure
as well as… naked greed.
[music fades]
And a million-dollar treasure is easy to get obsessed about.
[upbeat rock music playing]
[woman 1] What if we told you there was a treasure chest
somewhere in the mountains north of Santa Fe?
Find the treasure chest, and it's yours.
- It's life-changing money. - A million dollars in gold.
- Three million. - Five million dollars.
[cash register rings]
Hundreds of thousands of people took part,
and only one person's gonna win.
Thousands of people have flocked to Santa Fe, New Mexico
in hopes of finding that fortune.
[man 2] In order to find it, you'll need to solve clues hidden in a poem.
There's this larger-than-life character at the center of it.
- So, Forrest, who are you? - I hope nobody ever finds out.
People went nuts.
It did turn into madness.
[man 3] One guy called and said,
"Tell me where the treasure is right now, or I'm gonna kill you."
- [man 4] The poem directed me into here. - [man 5] Poem?
Yeah, the treasure map, the treasure hunt. You know?
[man 5 sighs] Okay.
[man 1] The treasure hunters would do anything to get to the finish line.
- [grunts] - How cool was that encounter?
I was not stopping until I found the treasure.
We're coming, Mr. Fenn! We're coming. Yeehaw!
I'm hoping whoever finds it reburies another treasure
'cause I don't want this… I don't want this search to end.
[mysterious music playing]
[man 1] What's wild about this treasure hunt is the treasure is real.
It was found,
and, despite all of the misadventures and cautionary lessons,
I know that…
someone has re-hidden the treasure.
[man 6] Let's take a break.
[man 7] I wanted to let you know,
I've hidden some clues in that interview setup.
[man 6] Oh.
[man 7] Within all the spaces you guys have filmed in my house.
[man 6] Clues to what?
[man 7] Well, I'm planning on hiding a treasure.
[man 6] What treasure?
[man 7] Well, hopefully, Forrest's.
[triumphant music playing]
[music fades]
[mysterious music playing]
[man 1] I had heard about Forrest before I even heard about the treasure hunt
because he was kind of a celebrity in the Santa Fe area.
[intriguing music playing]
Forrest, like, lived his life in chapters.
He's this highly decorated air force pilot.
More than 300 combat missions. Shot down twice, survives.
Then becomes a noted art dealer in Santa Fe,
and his clients included, like, Suzanne Somers
and Ralph Lauren and Michael Douglas.
Then, right, eventually, he sells his gallery,
and his next chapter of his life is he's diagnosed with kidney cancer.
[man 3] They said I had a one-in-five chance
of living three years.
So I told myself, "I'm gonna write this poem,
I'm gonna hide this treasure,
and, with my last dying gasp,
will be to go out there and where that treasure chest is
and take my own life."
It was a great plan. The trouble with it was I got well.
But just because I got well
didn't mean that I could not hide the treasure chest anyway,
and I did that.
[man 1] And then he has this treasure hunt,
and it became the massive phenomenon that it did.
[music fades]
But even though he said that this treasure hunt,
he expected it to take 900 years for someone to find the treasure,
it wasn't until the summer of 2020, when the treasure was found,
that then I thought, "Okay, there's a story
because now we have an ending."
[intriguing music playing]
I began after it ended.
That's what kind of gave me an entry point.
You can never predict the specifics,
but I think it's a good rule of thumb that most treasure hunts end badly.
[music fades]
[whip cracks]
Most of the treasure stories we hear
begin with some scrolled-up, sepia-toned treasure map,
"X marks the spot."
- [cash register rings] - And this was different.
It was true to who Forrest, this eccentric guy, was.
[dramatic Western music playing]
[woman] Forrest came into the store.
He told me that he had written a memoir,
and would I carry it?
But then he said, "Nobody's gonna wanna read this book about me,
so I put something in there that will make people buy it." [laughs]
[adventurous music playing]
[bird of prey calls]
[Forrest] Well, I had a treasure chest.
It was ten inches by ten inches, and five inches deep.
[music intensifies]
And I started filling it up with gold coins and gold nuggets
and lots of rubies and emeralds and diamonds
and… somewhere between one million and five million.
I've taken this treasure chest to a very secret and very special place,
somewhere in the Rocky Mountains north of Santa Fe,
and I've hidden it there.
If you wanna find the treasure chest, I'll tell you how to do it.
In my book, there's a poem,
and there are nine clues in the poem,
and the clues are in consecutive order.
[music fades]
As I have gone alone in there And with my treasures bold
I can keep my secret where And hint of riches new and old
- [bird of prey calls] - [intriguing music playing]
Begin it where warm waters halt And take it in the canyon down
- [man 1] Begin it… - [man 2] Begin it where warm waters halt
[woman 1] Not far, but too far to walk Put in below the home of Brown
[man 3] Put in below the home of Brown
[man 4] From there It's no place for the meek
The end is ever drawing nigh
[woman 2] From there It’s no place for the meek
[woman 3] The end is ever drawing nigh
[man 5] There will be no paddle Up your creek
Just heavy loads and water high
[woman 4] Heavy loads and water high
[man 6] If you've been wise And found the blaze
Look quickly down, your quest to cease
[man 7] …quickly down Your quest to cease
[woman 5] But tarry scant with marvel gaze Just take the chest, and go in peace
[man 8] Just take the chest Just take the chest, and go in peace
[woman 6] Just take the chest
[Forrest] Read the poem six, eight, ten times.
Study every line, every word.
But if… but if you have an imagination and you have a little bit of resolve,
you can find that treasure chest.
The first one to it can have it.
[triumphant music playing]
[music fades]
A treasure hunt is a great way of marketing a book.
I don't know anybody else who's ever done it. [laughs]
He said, "Will you carry this?" and of course I said yes,
and did I say, "No, I have to read it first before I decide"?
The answer's no.
[upbeat rock music playing]
I said, "I'd be delighted to carry these,"
wrote him a mighty check for something like a hundred dollars,
and we were off and running.
There was a travel magazine that highlighted the book,
and that really set it off.
[woman 1] A book by Santa Fe author Forrest Fenn
has absolutely exploded in popularity.
[man 1] The key to a $2 million treasure sits on a bookshelf.
[Dorothy] The book took off.
- The sales took off. - [bison grunts]
The treasure hunters took off.
But, you know, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
[laughs]
[woman 2] The book and subsequent treasure hunt
have sent shockwaves throughout New Mexico and beyond.
[man 2] Businesses have been inundated with treasure hunters
hoping to strike it rich.
[man 3] Santa Fe has become the place to be.
[woman 3] It's a Santa Fe free-for-all.
Next stop, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Whoo!
[man 3] Collected Works,
the exclusive reseller of The Thrill of the Chase,
has been hosting live events with its author, Forrest Fenn.
[man 4] Residents from all over Santa Fe have been flocking to the bookstore
in hopes of getting some face time with the author.
I'm gonna get the author to sign my book. Okay?
- [woman] I want him to sign. - Yeah, okay, and then we'll go.
[man] You wanna clap for me?
Yes.
- [man speaks indistinctly] - Is my voice still okay?
- [man] Yeah. - I'm not sounding hoarse?
Actually, I like it when I sound hoarse.
- [man chuckles] - It's more erotic.
[whimsical music playing]
The first time I met Forrest was October of 2013.
He was doing a book signing,
and I went up, and I said, "Hello, Mr. Fenn."
"My name is Cynthia. I'm so happy to meet you."
And he started off… The very first thing he said is,
"My father is Mr. Fenn."
"My name is Forrest."
Okay, so come on into this room.
So this is basically my, um, Forrest Fenn room.
I obviously kept all my books.
It says, "To Cynthia, keep looking. Forrest Fenn."
He scared the hell out of me the first time I saw him,
but we just had a lot of things that we had in common.
I loved the outdoors. I had enthusiasm.
Here, at almost 70 years old,
I still have that "don't give a frick" attitude.
I mean, I didn't take crap from anybody.
And neither did he.
[pensive music playing]
When I told Forrest how I had retired and I was so excited
because now I could just be a full-time treasure hunter,
he said that's exactly how he felt when he retired himself.
He understood the same freedom.
And before we left, he gave me his contact info,
and he told me to email him if I ever needed help.
That's when I became a full-fledged Forrest Fenn treasure hunter.
These are my original boots-on-the-ground pants.
I mean, if… if you go back and look at my pictures from way, way back,
it's like I'm still in these pants.
[jaunty music playing]
So, yeah, a lot of good memories in these pants,
and some of them out of these pants.
[chuckles]
It was just the most incredible experience,
but, as an older biddy
who worked for corporate America for most of her life,
I never did it for the money.
I did it for the adventure.
It's like, "My God, I am in my sixties,"
and I'm friggin' out there in the woods riding my bike with the bison.
[clattering]
I just crashed.
For a lot of people like me, it was just this greatest adventure of a lifetime.
You know, you get to go out and be Indiana Jones or whoever.
You have a map, and you get to solve it. You get to find it.
[music fades]
Before I retired, I was an engineer.
I worked for Nikon.
My career was problem-solving.
[laughing]
The first time I read the poem,
I'm thinking, "Well, this is like work. It's problem-solving."
"How hard can this be?"
[energetic rock music playing]
[Ben] Originally, the treasure hunt, really, was a local phenomenon,
but Forrest loved to be the center of attention. He loved publicity.
Our guest today is Forrest Fenn.
- Thank you for joining us. - My pleasure.
He was also, like, great copy,
as they used to say in the newspaper business,
because he's this incredible character.
I've read the poem. I could only determine one clue,
so I… I doubt that I'm gonna be the person who finds the treasure.
Don't give up. It's the thrill of the chase.
[Ben] But it was not until there was a big Newsweek story about the hunt
that brought in a lot of people.
The Newsweek article took this hunt national
and then international.
The media starts picking up the chatter,
and then, a few months after that,
Forrest started doing regular appearances on The Today Show.
This morning, he's with NBC's Janet Shamlian.
Okay. We've talked you into somehow giving us another clue this morning.
Well, I'm not gonna put an X on a map for you.
- No? - No.
- All right, well, how about the clue? - Okay.
The clue is the treasure is higher than seven… than 5,000 feet above sea level.
[Janet] The treasure is higher than 5,000 feet above sea level.
- Can you give us more than that? - No.
- [Janet] No? - No. That's all you get.
All right. Back to you guys.
All right, but now that goes along with the nine previous clues.
that are already on our website.
And that's when the whole thing exploded.
His website crashed.
Collected Works sold 1,500 copies in a day.
His book, The Thrill of the Chase, entered the top 100 on Amazon.
And so it developed this whole kind of subculture.
You had blogs, you had forums for Fenn-chasers to talk,
and people started posting their solutions to the puzzle.
Then, of course, you had all kinds of YouTube channels devoted to the hunt.
[all talking at once]
Did you know, in the Rocky Mountains, there's a treasure chest?
And, because of the Internet,
literally anyone could search for this treasure.
All you had to do was read the poem, and you could actually find the answer.
So it really did attract all types and from all walks of life.
I mean, you had high-school dropouts. You had PhDs.
There was the guy who invented Jelly Bellies.
There was John Wayne Bobbitt of tabloid fame.
Forrest just drew so many people to this treasure hunt.
At first, it was hundreds, then thousands, then Today Show appearances happen,
and then you start getting up into the tens of thousands.
By the end, it was over 300,000 people.
There was just this sense of, like, anyone could do this.
[music fades]
[man 1] Forrest actually did this for a purpose.
He wanted to bless people… like… like us,
hard people that grew up in a trailer park,
never seen nothing, really, or never got the chance to do anything.
Has potential to work.
I've been to penitentiary five times. You know what I mean?
We're rednecks, but we're not stupid rednecks.
Yeah.
I like to think of myself as a intellectual guy.
Yeah, I may be a high-school dropout, but, you know, I… I'm no dummy.
[pensive music playing]
I was at a friend's house.
He told me a guy by the name of Forrest Fenn hid some treasure
worth, at the time, everybody was saying one to five million dollars.
Like, wow.
I… I would love to be a millionaire one day.
[man 1] Chick-chick-chicken.
Chick-chick-chick…
Come on, girl. Let's go.
- Bye. - Bye.
[man 2] We're poor, and I wanted to buy myself a house
and, you know, live… live comfortable,
change my life for the better.
I love you. Drive safe.
Okay.
We weren't too rich,
so, um… I ended up, uh, going to a library.
[whimsical music playing]
I failed English in the ninth grade.
I do not like reading.
But I asked if they had a copy of The Thrill of the Chase in.
She said, "Yeah, we have a book on file. It's only one copy, though,
and we don't check out the historical copies,
especially if we only have one."
Then I'm like, "Hey, uh, do you mind if I, uh, make some copies?"
She's like, "Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, sweetheart."
Totally illegal.
I grabbed the whole book and copied page by page.
Stood there for two hours.
Each page.
[mimics printer]
I printed off hundreds of pages just so I can go home and read the book.
- I can't pay no $90 for a book. - $90 for a…
Man, I'm walking around without shoes.
[music fades]
And then I brought it to my dad.
And I was in my garage working an old '68 GTO.
[engine revs]
They read the poem to me,
and Christopher's like, "Listen to it, Dad."
"Just listen to the poem."
[Christopher] Begin it Where warm waters halt
And take it in the canyon down
Not far, but too far to walk
Put in below the home of Brown
[man 1] When we had first initially heard that poem,
it's like, "Man, he is talking about Kirwin, man."
Cody, Wyoming has got this old ghost mining town next to it,
which is Kirwin.
It's got the Brown Mountain, which is capitalized in his poem.
"It's no place for the meek."
A lot of people died from the avalanche there,
and gold mining out there and shit collapsing in on 'em.
[Christopher] Kirwin had a gold rush.
It was one of the biggest gold rushes in the United States.
- Bigger than California. - Bigger than California.
[man 1] So everything lined up,
and I'm like, "Damn, it does sound like Kirwin."
It… I mean, it's just right up the road, too, we're talking.
- That's pretty much right down the road. - Right down the road. Like, 50 miles.
Yeah.
[Christopher] I said, "The poem leads to Kirwin, Wyoming."
"That's all there is to it, and if there's anybody that can do it,
I think we can."
[adventurous music playing]
[engine revs]
[music fades]
[man] That's where it started?
Yeah, that's where it all started.
That one little poem.
You may think it's just as simple as… definitions on a piece of paper.
I see it as the tip of the iceberg.
[man] It sent you guys down the rabbit hole?
[exhales sharply]
A rabbit hole? Sent us to damn never-never land.
[intriguing music playing]
[Ben] The treasure hunt was this very exciting thing
that it's easy to become obsessed with,
so this kinda became everything to a certain set of these searchers,
but to get to it,
you actually have to get out into the quite dangerous American wilderness.
Forrest said from the beginning that it was in the Rockies,
but the Rocky Mountains are huge. They span 300,000 square miles.
They're in six or seven states. They go from New Mexico to Canada.
And the Rockies are not for the meek.
A lot can go wrong.
There's white-water rapids you can drown in.
There are sheer cliffs you can fall off of.
There are snakes. There's bears. There's black widows.
And, since the poem was extremely vague and ambiguous
and the solutions varied so wildly,
the same clues were sending people to totally different locations.
- [man 1] It's somewhere in Utah. - [man 2] New Mexico.
- [man 3] Nevada. - [man 4] Wyoming.
- [man 3] Arizona. - [woman 1] Colorado.
[man 4] We're on our way down to the Rio Grande Gorge.
[Forrest] The first clue,
"Begin it where warm waters halt, and take it in the canyon down,"
if you can't figure out that clue, you don't have anything.
If you don't have no… if you have not… you have nothing.
- Nothing. - Absolutely nothing.
You can't nail down nothing.
You're lost without "where warm waters halt."
The correct starting point.
So first clue's a big deal.
[Cynthia] Forrest basically said, "Keep it simple. Anyone can solve it."
I mean, he started off saying,
"Don't go in a place where an 80-year-old man couldn't go."
I hid that treasure chest when I was 79 or 80,
and I've said that, "Don't search any place where a 79- or 80-year-old man
couldn't hide that treasure chest."
[Cynthia] So, for me, knowing Forrest had been there
and knowing Forrest could do it at 80 years old,
all of those things were the criteria that had to fit
for me to think it's a viable search spot.
The first clue to the poem was, "Begin it where warm waters halt,"
so I always started with a hot spring,
of which there are many in New Mexico.
A lot of thermal activity in the Rocky Mountains.
It wasn't too much longer that I discovered San Antonio Hot Springs
on a map.
It was pretty accessible and was a fairly popular fishing spot.
In the book, Forrest described himself as an avid fisherman.
He talked a lot about some of his favorite spots to fish.
That made it very feasible that,
had Forrest fished there in San Antonio Creek,
as the book seemed to infer,
that could definitely have been my first clue solved.
The first thing I needed to do was touch the water
to make sure it really was warm,
literally warm water.
[suspenseful music playing]
It wasn't too hot, and it wasn't too cold.
The water really was warm.
So, if I know San Antonio Hot Springs is my warm-water solution,
the San Antonio Creek actually flowed through the San Antonio Canyon,
and now you are going to follow that creek "in the canyon down."
[pensive music playing]
[man 1] I'd rushed it.
I went boots on the ground right when I heard the poem,
thinking we just gonna bump into something, right?
I'm telling you you're jumping the gun. You ain't gonna find nothing significant.
I just knew it was pointless going out there wandering in the woods.
'Cause I knew there was a way to pinpoint it,
and it wasn't just you're going out there wandering.
We're officially gold miners.
Yeehaw!
[Christopher] So I do a little bit of research.
You know, "How else can I nail this down?"
And then that's when I found out about the synonyms.
The words are actually synonyms.
"Where" equals "lower."
"Warm" equals "sunshine."
Uh, "waters halt" equals "reservoir."
So they're synonyms. You see what I'm saying?
It literally describes Lower Sunshine Reservoir.
The warm waters halted at that reservoir.
There was no other body of water around,
and I knew that place like the back of my hand.
I've been on many adventures around that area.
So we start at Lower Sunshine Reservoir and "take it in the canyon down."
There's only one canyon in Kirwin. Wood River Canyon, right here.
- So we go down Wood River Canyon. - [tires screech]
I'm positive we're on the right track.
[dog barking]
[man] In the early days of the treasure hunt,
it was that true American adventure…
[dog whimpers]
…and it was a beacon of… of hope for so many people,
and that's something that is exceedingly hard to come by
in the modern era,
is an adventure with hopes and dreams.
[music fades]
[man] This is fun.
[Justin] I think, especially to those that knew me pretty well,
it was not a surprise that I got wrapped up in the treasure hunt.
Most of my family and friends would categorize me as eccentric.
[man] You ready?
Ready as I'll ever be.
I have a huge variety of hobbies,
uh, and I have a lot of different things that interest me.
[intriguing country music playing]
From woodworking to titanium anodizing in the garage
to just a little experiment around near-infrared wavelengths
as a way to create,
well, X-ray vision, effectively,
to software engineering, which is my main gig.
And a bit of rare-artifact collecting.
This is a project I'm working on.
These are coins that I've gathered from all around the world
and from different eras.
This one, I think, is pretty special.
A 1652 oak-tree shilling.
The currency that helped form us, America.
[music fades]
I was always really into history.
I think that's something I got from my family.
[gentle music playing]
So I grew up in Tucson, Arizona.
My grandfather was the fish-and-game warden
up in Montana, Wyoming, that whole area.
I spent a lot of summers up there myself.
And my grandfather taught me to get out and explore
and camp, hike, all of those things.
I got a metal detector,
and I must've put thousands of hours on that thing.
I strongly believe that treasures can and do exist.
[boy 1] Okey dokey!
[Justin] That's been true since I was a kid.
"Happy birthday, love Grandma and Grandpa."
- [man] Nice. - [woman] That's nice.
Oh!
- Guess what it is! - [man] I don't have a clue.
[boy 2] It's all fishermen.
- [boy 1] Gold! I told you. - [boy 2] Gold books!
[Justin] I became the family's resident treasure hunter.
I think the Victorio Peak treasure was the catalyst.
You know, at its core, it was just such a cool story.
In the '90s, that treasure hunt was a pretty big deal.
A search started this week for a legendary treasure in New Mexico.
It is supposed to be down a hole.
This hole on the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Legend has…
[Justin] It's like every kid's most amazing dream ever.
Stumbling upon a cavern with that sort of fortune.
Who wouldn't want that? Like, who wouldn't wanna be Indiana Jones?
[adventurous music playing]
He enters this cave, and he's going into this room
with this idol in the center and swiping it.
I mean, fortune and glory.
[man on TV] Fenn then wrote a poem with nine clues…
[Justin] And so then jump to years later,
when I first heard about the Forrest Fenn treasure,
it really reignited that spark from my childhood.
This was like a needle in a football field.
It was ten inches by ten inches by five inches
in the vast Rocky Mountain wilderness.
I felt myself getting more interested.
[music fades]
I think it's fair to say that, at some point,
the treasure hunt culminated into something more than a hobby.
I'm still doing my work professionally and everything.
Mornings, evenings, weekends,
I'm doing treasure hunting.
[suspenseful music playing]
When the hunt started, we had very little to go off of.
There was always that thought in the back of my mind that it was buried.
If something's buried, the odds are astronomically low
that you'd ever succeed in finding it.
I realized that a bit of scientific process was needed
in order to have any sort of chance at finding this.
I had read this article that most dogs can detect different precious metals
six-plus feet down.
My thought was I could train Tucker
to specifically sniff out bronze,
because the treasure chest is bronze.
So we gave it a shot.
At first, it was just treats.
[funky music playing]
And then it was treats plus pieces of bronze.
And the big switch happened where I removed the treats entirely,
and it was just bronze.
[music fades]
And I think what we discovered pretty quickly
is that he could smell bronze at least four feet down,
and that was more than enough.
[Justin] I had an unparalleled level of confidence.
We're gonna find it. Yeah, we're gonna find it.
It's gonna take some time.
[Justin] After Tucker did a pass,
I never had to go back.
So, now that we had the secret weapon, the next question was where do we start?
You know, you gotta… you gotta start at the beginning.
You start "where warm waters halt," and that kicks off the adventure.
[country music playing]
There were so many different interpretations
of "where warm waters halt."
The first time that I went out searching for the treasure,
I had done a lot of research ahead of time.
I would scour all the Rocky Mountains for place names
that would resemble anything kinda warm.
- [music fades] - What warms the water? Well, the sun.
Or, more specifically, the sunlight.
- [adventurous music playing] - So I found Sunlight Basin in Wyoming.
And we had Sunlight Creek that comes off the mountain,
and it ends at Dead Indian Pass.
So the warm water halts as those two come together.
The cherry on top,
in the summertime, the snow melts,
and an X appears on the side of the mountain,
like, at least 100 by 100 feet, just… [splutters]
[music fades]
If we "take it in the canyon down,"
well, in Sunlight Basin,
there's Sunlight Gorge.
A gorge is a canyon. That's the solution to the second clue.
So that was going to be our starting point.
[stirring music playing]
What's the third clue?
"Not far, but too far to walk."
There's some place you need to go that isn't far, but you can't walk it.
[man] There we go.
[Justin] And so I found
the only place in Cody that would rent ATVs.
[Christopher] The third clue was "not too far, but too far to walk."
- Guess what? - Okay!
Guess what? Just let me talk. Guess what?
- It's a marathon. - [man 1] Marathon.
- "Too far to walk," you know? - You gotta run.
[Christopher] Well, Wood River Canyon, it's the same distance as a marathon,
so that's why it's too far to walk.
[upbeat music playing]
[Cynthia] "Not far, but too far to walk."
If you take it literally,
it sounds like it's gonna be a distance too far to walk for someone.
Did Forrest mean that for him when he was 80 years old
and he was actually doing this?
I thought no. Maybe it means you need to drive.
And when you get to San Antonio Hot Springs,
you have to cross this little bridge.
There was an actual building that was a cabin that was brown.
Holy cow.
[Cynthia] I'm definitely onto something here.
I had my "home of Brown."
[Christopher] Now we're at "put in below the home of Brown."
So, if you look here,
B is capitalized in the poem
as a person, place, or thing.
Brown Mountain… is a place.
- [adventurous music playing] - It's capitalized just like it should be.
"Put in below the home of Brown." Below it.
Well, below it was Kirwin.
So far, so good.
[Justin] "Home of Brown" was hard. I couldn't figure it out,
and it just so happened, as you traverse Sunlight Basin,
you can't help but pass by the JD Salinger ranch.
Forrest talked about Catcher in the Rye in his book.
Several times, he talked about Catcher in the Rye.
Publisher for Salinger was Little, Brown and Company.
So, as far as I was concerned,
Salinger Ranch is the home of Brown, right?
I mean, how fitting.
[tense music playing]
It's like, okay, from here, "it's no place for the meek."
I guess I'll turn it off.
So you go off into the woods. Like, you gotta be brave.
[snarling]
[man] Whoa, there's a bear. For reals.
- [Justin] Shit. - [woman] We gotta go.
[Justin] Just keep talking in a low voice. Get your bear sprays at the ready.
Everything started lining up even stronger and stronger,
and then you get "The end is ever drawing nigh."
Make sure you keep your eyes open. Anywhere through here is fair game.
It's somewhere in this immediate vicinity.
[adventurous music playing]
[Cynthia] So, at that point, I was in the middle of the wilderness,
and this is so crazy because I'm alone,
but I didn't care. I was on a mission.
I gotta keep going. I gotta go touch the water.
I had to find "the heavy loads and water high,"
and, at that time of year, the river was filled with boulders.
You certainly could not paddle up it.
So "there'll be no paddle up your creek, just heavy loads and water high."
[Christopher] Only one creek near Kirwin, and it's called Cascade Creek.
Definition of cascade is
"of water poured downward rapidly in large quantities."
"Heavy loads and water high."
But, for me,
this is where I reached the end
with just the poem.
We had it all lined up to the tee.
The only thing that we were missing was visualizing the final clue,
but I knew I was supposed to be at Cascade Creek.
That's all I knew.
Trying to figure out what this "heavy loads" was
and this "water high," and we couldn't quite piece it together.
Sometimes you need to take a step back and reanalyze and get a new footing.
It… it helps kinda hit that reset.
[Cynthia] The first trip I'd go,
I never could find anything that stood out.
I never use the word "failure."
When your day's over, and you just can't find the treasure chest,
for me, it's like, "Oh my God, now I'm going to the next one."
I'll look for a different hot spring in New Mexico
and try to find another place that fits the poem.
[sweeping orchestral music playing]
[Ben] At first, the hunt did what Forrest said he hoped it would do.
It got people off their couches.
After you get through the first few years
and the sort of more commonsense, uh, solutions
have not panned out,
um, and people start getting more and more extreme
in… in the complexity of their solves…
You try the simpler, you know, seemingly more obvious thing first,
and it's not right, so then you gotta move up a level.
[intriguing music playing]
Now you really have to start thinking more imaginatively and more complexly.
Here's one of the ways that I laid everything out.
I went one through 166,
and then I went one through 166 up
in case there was some sort of reverse code being used.
[Ben] And if common sense didn't work, then you go beyond common sense,
and now you're sort of, you know, overintellectualizing.
They just start getting very wild.
People who had just spent hours and hours poring over this poem,
trying to decipher it,
coming up with more and more elaborate theories,
which they all called solves.
My Nez Perce solve starts at the first battle of Nez Perce.
The treasure chest is in Meeteetse
because of the line of the poem that anagrams to Meeteetse.
[Ben] People were looking at homophones, words that sounded like numbers.
They would add up to GPS coordinates.
[man 1] I was looking at the fours, the twos.
- 'Cause the first coordinate was 44. - [man 2] Ah!
The puzzle started out as, like… it's this objective puzzle.
Here are the clues.
It doesn't have much to do with anything Forrest might happen to say
'cause all of the truth is here in these 24 lines.
I do think, at a certain point, the treasure hunters expanded the focus
from this book to "This is the gatekeeper. This is the guy who knows the secret."
- Who knows where the treasure is? - Only me.
[Ben] It all got focused on Forrest.
He was getting, you know, 100 emails a day,
then 150 emails a day.
I think he definitely liked it at first.
I mean, he would respond to everyone. Everyone.
And as Forrest became, really, the center of this treasure hunt,
he became the… the object of interpretation,
and everyone's obsessing over everything he says.
I think he couldn't help himself.
He kind of got into the flirtation or the game of it,
and, given his nature to embellish,
that, inevitably, he just started saying things,
um, that might be clues or might not be clues.
He loved teasing out this secret that only he knew on national television.
And Forrest is now with us.
How did we talk you into giving us another clue?
- I don't have a clue. - [laughter]
He even has, like, a monthly appearance on The Today Show
to give some kind of clue or hint.
The treasure is not associated with any structure.
[Janet] Good clue.
Before, you just had to pay attention to the book,
but now you had to pay attention to him.
The treasure is not in a graveyard.
[Ben] There was a drib or drab of a hint of where it was or where it wasn't.
The treasure is not in Idaho or Utah.
[Ben] The more appearances he made, the more tape there was of him,
the more there was for the community to analyze.
I've never said that it was buried. I've never said that it wasn't buried.
[Ben] Forrest knew that the treasure hunters
would, like, read everything into anything he said.
The most important thing that influenced my life
was learn to play golf.
[Cynthia] I would always pay attention when Forrest was on TV,
thinking, "Oh my God. Is there a hint in here?"
And it… it totally became a game.
I mean, Forrest is playing with us.
Or was he?
My father used to tell me,
"Grab every banana."
[man 1] Forrest said, "Grab every banana."
[man 2] How can that apply to the chase?
I used to work folding burger wrappers at Burger King
with his interviews in the background.
A northerly direction, to me, means anything north of 270 degrees.
[man] Really, according to Forrest, it doesn't have to be a real definition.
It can just be whatever he wants it to mean.
Did I give you a hint? Really?
[Ben] Forrest was this kind of trickster character.
Do you know what a rake is?
A rake is somebody that's halfway between a scoundrel and a good guy.
We're all charlatans to some degree.
He said, "My natural instinct is to embellish things a little."
- He said, "It doesn't matter who you are." - It doesn't matter who you are.
- "It matters who they think you are." - It only matters who they think you are.
He became an unreliable narrator.
So, Forrest, who are you,
and who do people think you are?
I hope nobody ever finds out.
[Ben] Maybe that's a clue, or maybe that's a red herring.
Maybe I should try to infer something from something he said,
or maybe I should completely ignore it,
which kind of sends the hunt into a level of chaos.
I think he just reveled in saying things
that could be interpreted in any number of ways.
[video inaudible]
It was fun for him. It was a game. But it's also, like, really serious.
The stakes were extremely high,
and searchers were doing anything they could to give themselves an edge.
[Justin] I was still looking for a new way through the poem,
so I was paying close attention to everything Forrest was saying.
[gentle country music playing]
There were thousands of solutions that I considered.
Let's look at this.
Over the years, I searched Colorado,
New Mexico,
Wyoming,
and I realized over time
the poem could be made to fit a plethora of locations.
Hundreds and hundreds of days of searching,
and it just wasn't working.
[splutters] Didn't sleep well last night.
I was very sleep-deprived.
There has to be a different way of approaching this.
This trial and error… just doesn't work.
[mysterious music playing]
And thus the idea was born of using facial recognition,
where you could actually look at all the interviews that Forrest did
and analyze those.
There's a series of what's called micro-expressions
or action units that form.
There's relative eyebrow movement,
pursed lips, parted lips,
and I'm just scratching the surface.
If you can unlock for a person a set of micro-expressions
that indicate something suspicious,
that's gold.
There was a Lorene Mills interview that happened early in the chase.
Hello. I'm Lorene Mills, and welcome to Report from Santa Fe.
[Justin] There were a few times during that interview
where the micro-expressions strongly suggested a fear response.
That happened when Forrest was asked something about Yellowstone.
I can't remember how many times
that I would… could hardly wait in Yellowstone to go… to go trout fishing
on the Madison River, the Gallatin, the Firehole, the Gibbon.
After I created that software, I had a strong belief
that the treasure was located in the Yellowstone National Park.
[dog barking]
[whimsical music playing]
[Cynthia] I really couldn't figure out what my next step would be,
but I remembered that Forrest told me to email him if I ever needed help,
so I did,
and I got a response right away.
[beep]
When I was invited to go along, it's like, "Absolutely I will go do this,"
and that was… that was an incredible experience.
- [ethereal music playing] - And it wasn't just me.
Forrest would invite strangers to come to his home in the early years.
If I was his wife, I would've killed him way long ago.
[intriguing music playing]
I was so nervous when I first went to his home,
I took a flask of Bailey's Irish Cream,
hoping to calm my nerves.
And he said, "Cynthia, that is insulting,"
and it's like, "Okay."
"No… no more Bailey's, damn it."
[stirring music playing]
Forrest opened the door.
I hope my mouth wasn't hanging open.
I mean, it was impressive as hell.
The walls were adorned with all sorts of artifacts,
a lot of buffalo skulls.
Every spot that had a place where something could be sitting
had something.
[Cynthia] We sat and talked for a little while.
[Cynthia] There I am, listening to everything he's telling me,
wondering, "Is… is this a hint?"
[Cynthia] I mean, Forrest had given out several hints over the years,
so it's possible.
[Cynthia] He said, "Okay, come back again next week,"
and then, after that, it's like, I was there all the time.
He couldn't get rid of me.
For me, the game changed.
The game was more than the boots on the ground
and finding the chest.
A lot of this game was engaging with Forrest
and trying to figure out if anything he was saying was a clue.
So it was the game of wits between Forrest and me that I just loved.
[man] Sounds kinda manipulative though.
In… in what way?
[man] Well, to… that that was your game, right?
Oh, so… so who was manipulating who?
[pensive music playing]
[Christopher] I had to question myself, like, "Are we completely wrong?"
We had… we had tried the poem and… and reached wit's end.
It couldn't be found just looking around.
We knew that we had to have a pinpoint destination.
You weren't just gonna stumble on it.
So we were studying day and night.
[Christopher] We're listening to each interview
over and over and over and over.
[man 1] I mean, I've studied this man.
I wanted to know how many times he folded his shit paper before he wiped his ass.
- [laughter] - That's how bad I studied this man.
He lived in my head rent-free for 24 hours of the day.
[Forrest speaking on TV]
I was not stopping until I found the confirmation,
and that tells me, "You're on the right track,
and you're close."
And then, Forrest Fenn,
he was invited to this New Mexico radio show.
The guy asked him about this guy named Andrew Briggs.
- Forrest Fenn, good to see you. - Good morning to you, Richard.
[Richard] Now, I got this email
from a gentleman by the name of Andy Briggs.
who said he's found a code word.
If you overlay the code word,
it solves the entire riddle
with the exception of one small thing he couldn't quite get.
- You're familiar with this guy, right? - [Forrest] I am, yes.
He's a pretty bright guy. He's got a lot of it figured out, maybe.
[moody music playing]
[Christopher] He said that Andrew Briggs is a pretty bright guy.
He's got a lot of it figured out.
That hit me hard.
A lot of people thought he was joking.
A lot of people said, "Oh, no, he's just pulling the guy's leg."
I said, "No, no, what this guy has is significant."
[suspenseful music playing]
Andrew Briggs found a keyword cipher,
which allowed him to decrypt the poem.
A cipher is an ancient method for encrypting codes within a document
so no one would know it's there.
You have to have one keyword.
If you use the right keyword, you get a whole new message.
It's the same method that Thomas Jefferson used
to speak with his soldiers through a secret code.
Andy Briggs figured out a keyword in the cipher
that would unlock hidden directions in the poem,
and he put it all in an e-book.
So we used the, uh, Andy Briggs method to, uh, decrypt the poem.
[mysterious music playing]
Believe it or not, sure as hell, it gives you directions.
[Christopher, man 1] "Go west. In a short hour, you'll see a big lake."
"Cross it."
"Run south. Come west."
[Christopher] "Aim south. Look heading west for a gray F."
[man 1] We already knew we were starting at Lower Sunshine Reservoir,
right outside of Kirwin.
I started running the directions on Google Earth.
Flying down the canyon,
like I'm in a f… in a plane, flying, flying,
when something caught my eye.
I'm like, "Holy shit!"
So I go and wake the boys up at what time, son?
- What time? Three in the morning? - Four in the morning.
Three, four in the morning in tears.
I about shit myself.
- [uplifting music playing] - Sure as shit. There it is.
The gray F is carved on the side of the mountain.
So I zoom in and hit the topo.
What's it at? 10,200 feet.
[Forrest] I've said that the treasure's above 5,000 feet,
and it's below 10,200 feet.
Why would he say 5,000 feet and 10,200?
Why not say five and 11?
Now it says, "Aim south," so we're aiming south,
and guess where that takes me?
Right back to Cascade Creek.
- [music intensifies] - This came in as a huge confirmation.
- [music fades] - Like, "Holy shit."
Not only did the poem line up, the cipher lined up too.
It takes me back to the exact same place again.
Cascade Creek.
I'm like, are you fucking kidding me?
You run into one coincidence,
yeah, that's a coincidence.
You run into a coincidence after a coincidence after a coincidence…
- That's evidence. - That's evidence.
[adventurous music playing]
[man 1] We're coming, Mr. Fenn.
We're coming.
[Christopher] At that point, I'm positive we're on the right track.
And we're off.
[man 1] We start taking Cascade Creek up.
Well, as we're going up Cascade,
there's blaze markers in the trees that are hatchet.
Oh!
- Well, you can see the hatchet marks. - [music fades]
You see the hatchet marks where… he made.
They're old blaze markers from the '30s and '40s.
- [Christopher] Mining trails. - [man 1] Mining trail.
They made 'em for navigation.
- [stirring music playing] - The final clue was, uh, the blaze.
Just like the poem says.
"If you've been wise and found the blaze, look quickly down, your quest to cease."
[man 1] As long as I see them blaze markers,
I know I'm in the right spot.
- There's nine blaze markers… - Nine.
…on the trail.
[both] There's nine clues. Nine blaze markers.
[man 1] We're thinking, "Let's see if we can find anything."
We go out there, and we tear up a few things,
looking around.
If you're looking for a treasure, they're always found buried.
- [thud] - At the center of that area was a boulder.
And you could see, plain as day,
how logs were dropped and stacked to where the boulder would roll
and hit the log and roll to a specific spot.
Man, my mom and stepdad ran a tree business.
Both of the two trees, boom, boom, dropped dead sy… sy… symmetrical.
This boulder, he blasted, anyways, from up there.
The boulder had no other choice
but to come right through these two stumps.
I was like, "Oh my God, he didn't bury it."
"He entombed it."
He put it on the ground, and he put a… boulder on it.
[Christopher] He set the chest there and then set, like,
some dynamite on the wall
and then blew it and let nature cover it.
[detector beeping]
[man 1] Christopher, come here.
[detector buzzing]
[man 1] Whoo-ee!
That's a good-ass sign! Oh my!
[Christopher] Let me see something.
Well, Mr. Fenn, we got camp set up.
We're here to stay. We gotta secure our… our fortune.
[unsettling music playing]
[Christopher] It sucked, yeah. We were freezing. Might've died.
I've risked my life out there. We both risked our lives out there.
We were in the middle of the canyon, freezing to death.
But we all had our jobs to do.
[man 1] At that point, we knew the treasure was under the rock.
Yeah.
I said, "The boulder's gotta go."
[echoing digging]
[music fades]
[Report from Santa Fe theme music playing]
[Lorene] You've tapped into this passion
for… for mystery and for treasure hunts and pirate booty.
All these things. People…
You have just tapped into a vein, not of gold,
but of magic and mystery that people are really hungry for.
[stirring music playing]
[Ben] This gold madness, treasure craziness
meant people were taking greater and greater physical risks.
There's a line in the poem, "no place for the meek."
I mean, in hindsight, I think that was a very ill-advised line to put in the poem
because any… anyone could reasonably read that
to mean, like, "I'm gonna have to go somewhere
that really has a lot of dangers."
But these were armchair treasure hunters.
A lot of them had never been camping, right?
And suddenly they're going into some of the most forbidding wilderness
in North America.
You have people rappelling into the Grand Canyon
with not enough rope to reach the bottom.
You have people wearing jeans and a thin shirt
into Dinosaur National Monument in winter.
The risks, the physical risks people were taking,
the tough spots people were getting into.
I mean, so many crazy things happened
that… that… that tells you
the level of obsession for some of these people.
There have been unintended consequences
because, in the last six months,
there's been a Texas woman on the treasure hunt
who got lost in Bandelier, had to be rescued.
So can you, in the interests of… of human kindness,
give some warning to people?
It's the Rocky Mountains,
and there are certain rules that you need to observe
when you go into the forest.
But you know, the American people should not have to be told those things.
There are always exceptions,
and they learn the hard way.
[uneasy music playing]
[woman 1] This Colorado man hunting for treasure
in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is missing.
[woman 2] Fifty-four-year-old Randy Bilyeu told a friend
he planned to travel on the Rio Grande River
nearly two weeks ago.
[woman 3] His car was found in a remote area outside Santa Fe,
where he left it.
Randy left in a raft with his faithful dog, Leo.
His plan was to float the Rio Grande in January or February.
I think he got a raft from Walmart.
[woman 3] The raft was found nine miles further downstream.
Miraculously, little Leo was still alive.
[music intensifies]
Let me know as soon as you find out anything,
and I'm not gonna tell his wife yet.
[Cynthia] Forrest was contacted by state police,
saying, "This guy was searching for your treasure chest."
"Do you have information about him?"
And, of course, he didn't.
[woman 3] Forrest Fenn himself has joined the search for Randy,
but hope is fading.
We didn't find Randy. But we gave it a good shot.
[tense music playing]
[Cynthia] They finally ran out of places to search,
and they called it off.
The treasure hunter who disappeared several months ago has been found dead.
[man] Fifty-four-year-old Randy Bilyeu's remains
were found along the Rio Grande.
[woman] Randy Bilyeu is one of hundreds
who've gone looking for Fenn's $2 million treasure,
but the first to die while doing it.
People started questioning, "Forrest, why don't you call off the hunt?"
Like, "Why… why is this thing still going on?"
"How can you continue what had been fun and games
now that it was a matter of life and death?"
Tonight, there are calls for a man to end his treasure hunt.
This treasure hunt is ludicrous,
out of control, dangerous,
and it should be stopped.
[Justin] How do you come back from losing a life?
And that's… that's the crux of this. It's a double-edged sword.
I certainly couldn't fault him for ending it
based on how things had transpired.
Uh, it was…
He was really stuck between a rock and a hard place.
He really was.
Shit happens, you know?
When… when you get out of bed every morning, shit happens.
So my point of view was,
"Do not call this off."
I was so nervous about what could happen to the chase.
I thought, "Oh my God. What if someone else dies?"
"What if it happens again?"
[woman] How's it going?
I th… I think it's out of control. [chuckles]
- [jaunty music playing] - [man] Just plain madness.
That's the only way to describe the state of this treasure hunt.
I was like, "This is findable. I can do this."
[Christopher] God. We lived out there all year round.
Sixteenth day out here on the boulder.
It… it went crazy.
Oh fuck.
[woman] We had the SWAT team.
They wanted to take us all into protective custody.
[Justin] I had this driving obsession to find this before anyone else.
[man] In my opinion,
Mr. Fenn should reevaluate his, uh, treasure hunt.
And, at this point, everyone's wondering, "What's Forrest gonna do now?"
"What is this unreliable trickster character
gonna do next?"
[Justin] The treasure hunt was like someone offering you a ticket
and saying, "You wanna take the ride?"
[music fades]
I took the ticket.
My advice is, if someone gives you a ticket to ride, you take the ride.
[chuckles]
[closing theme music playing]
[music fades]