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Traversing the wilderness in search of a buried fortune with only a 24-line poem as a map sounds like the plot of a fantasy film — but it’s a real-life adventure many people took on at the direction of Forrest Fenn.
Now, Netflix is taking viewers along for the hunt in its docuseries Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure, which premiered on March 27.
The adventure began in 2010 when art collector and author Fenn announced in his memoir The Thrill of the Chase that he had hidden a treasure chest filled with precious items somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. At the end of his book, Fenn wrote a poem with nine clues that revealed the chest’s location.
“I’ve had so much fun over the last 75 years looking for arrowheads and fossils and strange things out in the forests and along the river banks, why not give others the opportunity to do the same thing?” he told PEOPLE in 2016.
Though the wealthy art dealer believed that anyone could solve it if they kept their search simple and only went places an elderly man could go, several people died during the pursuit. Ten years after the hunt began, Fenn announced that the treasure had been found and that the man who discovered it wished to remain anonymous.
Three months later, the 90-year-old art collector died of natural causes.
So, where is the treasure from Gold & Greed now? Here’s everything to know about what happened to Forrest Fenn and his $1 million treasure chest.
Who was Forrest Fenn?
Forrest Fenn was an art dealer, collector and author who orchestrated a massive treasure hunt in 2010. Prior to hiding his fortune, Fenn served in the Vietnam War as an Air Force pilot.
He later became an art dealer in Santa Fe, N.M., for fashion designers like Ralph Lauren and Hollywood icons like Michael Douglas and Suzanne Somers. In 1988, Fenn was diagnosed with kidney cancer and told it was terminal. This inspired him to honor his lifelong love of finding things by leaving behind a puzzle poem that led to a buried treasure chest, per Intelligencer.
When the art dealer unexpectedly recovered from the disease, he decided he still wanted to lead a treasure hunt and published a poem of clues in his 2010 memoir The Thrill of the Chase.
The end of the text read, “So hear me all and listen good, / Your effort will be worth the cold. / If you are brave and in the wood / I give you title to the gold.”
Though the exact contents were unknown, Gold & Greed filmmakers claimed that there were 476 gold pieces, coins, jewelry and other artifacts worth over $1 million in the chest.
Author Douglas Preston told Intelligencer that Fenn believed it would take “900 years” for someone to find the treasure.
How many people died looking for Forrest Fenn’s treasure?
Of the over 300,000 people Gold & Greed claimed took part in the hunt, five died trying to find Fenn’s treasure.
Randy Bilyeu was found dead along the Rio Grande in New Mexico in 2016 after he had been missing for months, per The Denver Post. His cause of death remains unknown.
The following year, Eric Ashby went missing after his raft overturned on the Arkansas River in Colorado. Though other people were also pulled into the water, Ashby never resurfaced, and his remains were later found.
The same year, Jeff Murphy died after falling 500 feet from a slope in Yellowstone National Park while searching for the hidden chest. NBC affiliate KULR reported in 2018 that Fenn had offered to pay for a helicopter to help find the man when he was reported missing.
The body of missing Colorado pastor Paris Wallace was found in 2017 near the Rio Grande Gorge in New Mexico after he went searching for the infamous loot, Westword reported. Three years later, Michael Wayne Sexson was found dead in Colorado near the Dinosaur National Monument after he and a friend went out looking for the treasure on snowmobiles. The county coroner told The Denver Post that there were no signs of foul play.
Though people urged Fenn to call off the treasure hunt due to the multiple fatalities, he told PEOPLE in 2016 that he couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to.
“I certainly did not anticipate anyone was going to get killed,” Fenn said. “But I answer those people this way: If a hunter goes into the mountains looking for deer, and is lost, does that mean we should stop deer hunting? If someone drowns in a swimming pool, should we drain the pool, or should we teach people to swim?”
Who found Forrest Fenn’s treasure?
When Fenn first confirmed that his treasure had been found in June 2020, he only described the triumphant hunter to Today as “a man from back East” who was “shy” and wished to remain anonymous.
Later that year, the hunter revealed his identity in a story for Outside. Jack Stuef, a then-32-year-old medical student from Michigan, said he only came forward because a fellow treasure hunter who claimed he had stolen their solution had threatened him with a lawsuit that would have made his name publicly known. Stuef has denied the theft claims.
“I am the person who found Forrest’s famed treasure,” he wrote in a 2020 Medium post after Fenn’s death. “The moment it happened was not the triumphant Hollywood ending some surely envisioned; it just felt like I had just survived something and was fortunate to come out the other end.”
Where was Forrest Fenn’s treasure found?
The exact location of Fenn’s treasure has never been revealed — Stuef only told Outside that he found it in Wyoming. Treasure hunter Justin Posey told Gold & Greed filmmakers that he believed a major clue leading to the treasure had been destroyed, prolonging its discovery.
“It was extremely well hidden in the general area where it was found,” he said in the docuseries. “It’s my understanding that the [marked tree] ‘blaze’ that was supposed to point to where the treasure was had suffered a natural disaster of sorts and was no longer recognizable.”
Posey continued, “If that had been recognizable, there’s a great chance that this treasure hunt would’ve been over within a couple of years, as opposed to the decade-plus that it spanned.”
Where is Forrest Fenn’s treasure now?
After discovering Fenn’s treasure, Stuef sold it to Tesouro Sagrado Holdings, LLC, who in turn passed it on to a Dallas Auction house, per Outside.
Approximately 476 items — including a 549-gram Alaskan gold nugget and Fenn’s 20,000-word autobiography — were later sold in an online auction that generated over $1.3 million.
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