For a decade, hundreds of thousands of people quit jobs, drove across the country, and combed the Rocky Mountains searching for a hidden fortune. In June 2020, a 32-year-old medical student from Michigan named Jack Stuef walked out of the wilderness carrying it.

The Man Who Started It All

Forrest Fenn was a New Mexico art dealer and Vietnam veteran who was diagnosed with cancer in 1988. Determined to do something memorable, he eventually assembled a bronze chest filled with gold nuggets, ancient coins, jewels, and rare artifacts - a haul he estimated at around $2 million. Around 2010 he hid it somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, then published a memoir, The Thrill of the Chase, containing a cryptic 24-line poem he claimed held the clues to its exact location. The hunt was on.

350,000 Searchers. Ten Years. No Find.

An estimated 350,000 people joined the search over the following decade, scouring New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Five searchers died during the hunt. Fenn repeatedly confirmed the chest was real and still waiting. Critics called it a hoax. True believers called it the greatest treasure hunt in American history.

The Medical Student Who Cracked the Poem

Jack Stuef, a former journalist turned medical student, discovered the hunt on Twitter in early 2018. He spent two years obsessively analyzing Fenn's poem, cross-referencing his interviews, and studying the geography. He made multiple trips to a single location in Wyoming, spending a total of 25 days searching that area alone, before finding the chest on June 6, 2020. Fenn's attorney later signed an affidavit confirming the chest and all its contents matched exactly what had been hidden in 2010.

What Happened After the Find

Forrest Fenn died on September 7, 2020 - just three months after the treasure was recovered - without ever publicly revealing the exact location. Stuef also declined to disclose the site, citing concern for the fragility of the landscape. He eventually sold the chest and contents to a private company, Tesouro Sagrado Holdings, in September 2022. A Heritage Auctions sale that December offered 476 items from the chest - including a 549-gram Alaskan gold nugget, a gold pectoral from Colombia, and a medieval frog pendant - generating $1.3 million in sales. Netflix released a three-part documentary, Gold and Greed: The Hunt for Fenn's Treasure, in March 2025.

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