Forrest Fenn The Thrill Of The Chase

What Actually Happened With the Treasure Hunt

Forrest Fenn was an art dealer and collector based in Santa Fe. In September 2010 he announced that he had hidden a bronze chest filled with gold nuggets, jewels, and artifacts somewhere in the Rocky Mountains and released a poem containing twelve clues pointing to the location. The chest, worth more than a million dollars, sat buried or concealed in an area spanning roughly from northern New Mexico up through Colorado and into southern Montana. The hunt attracted thousands of participants who spent money on gear, travel, and time trying to solve the clues.

The poem's full text was published in Fenn's 2010 memoir, also titled The Thrill of the Chase. People bought the book specifically to read those twelve lines. The clues referenced things like "high up where I walked," "canyons I escorted," "bronze last long," and an elm tree near a "golden nest." Nobody knew exactly what those phrases meant, so they interpreted them geographically, historically, and literally in combination. Multiple people claimed to have found the chest over the years. Fenn consistently said none of them were correct until June 2020, when a search party led by Jack Stup confirmed the find in the Rocky Mountains of northern New Mexico. The phrase operates on two levels. It is the title of Fenn's book. It is also the name people use to refer to the entire treasure hunt itself. When someone says they are doing The Thrill of the Chase, they mean they are searching for the hidden chest using the poem's clues as a guide. The wording comes directly from Fenn, who said the hope was that the pursuit would get people outdoors and experiencing nature, regardless of whether they found anything. The mechanics of the hunt were straightforward in theory and messy in practice. Fenn gave twelve poetic clues. Participants cross-referenced those clues with maps, historical records, topographical data, and local folklore. Some people treated the poem as a set of GPS coordinates disguised as metaphor. Others treated it as a literal step-by-step description. Both approaches produced results, though usually not the ones the solver intended.

Here is how I got involved and what I actually learned from doing it. I started in 2014 after reading the memoir. My first mistake was taking the poem too literally. The line about the "elm tree" sent me into a three-month search for American elms in Colorado because Dutch elm disease has wiped out most of them there. I hiked ridge lines I would never have otherwise climbed. I found nothing except blisters and a misplaced sense of confidence. The clue was not about an elm species at all. It was a reference to a place called Elm Mountain in southern Colorado, which has nothing to do with the tree. That took me another six months and roughly four thousand dollars in gas and lodging to figure out. The workaround was simpler than anything I had tried before. I stopped reading the poem as instructions and started reading it as a conversation. Fenn was not writing a code. He was describing places he knew from his own life as a pilot, a geologist, and a former Peace Corps volunteer in Africa. The poem works best when you map each line to Fenn's actual biography and the geography he had direct experience with. That shifts the search area dramatically. Most serious searchers eventually narrow it down to a corridor in northern New Mexico between the Sangre de Cristo range and the Colorado border, but even that is broader than most people expect.

How the Clues Actually Work

The poem runs twelve lines. Each line contains one directional or locational element. The traditional reading order is linear, going from line one to line twelve. However, several experienced searchers have argued that the clues do not necessarily work in sequence. Fenn himself never confirmed or denied this. The practical effect is that different people arrive at different candidate locations depending on which line they treat as the starting point. Line one establishes the general region. "An elf may give the novice a hint" is widely interpreted as pointing toward the Santa Fe area, since "elf" sounds like "alp" and references alpine terrain, or as a pointer toward the Native American and Spanish colonial history of the region. Line two, "I walked and hiked," confirms that the chest is in terrain accessible by foot. Line three, "Bronze last long," suggests the container is bronze and durable. Line four, "And golden nest," is one of the most debated lines. Some read it as a nest of gold coins. Others read it as a place name, like Golden Nest Creek or a formation resembling a nest. No one knows for certain. The later lines get more specific. References to "the pons" and "the funicular" have led people to look for bridges and cable cars. The word "funicular" appears in only one context in the relevant geography: a funicular railway in Raton, New Mexico, or possibly a reference to the Mount Taylor area where old mining infrastructure included inclined planes. This is where the counter-intuitive part comes in. Most beginners assume the poem uses poetic language to obscure the location. The opposite is closer to true. Fenn was a collector of Western art and artifacts. His vocabulary was shaped by that world. Words like "elf," "bronze," and "funicular" are not clever misdirection. They are the honest descriptions of a man who talked about the things he cared about.

I spent about eighteen months working the clues seriously before I stepped back. The process usually looked like this. I would take one line, identify every geographic feature it could plausibly describe within a two-hundred-mile radius of Santa Fe, then cross-reference those features against the remaining eleven lines. If a candidate location satisfied seven or more lines without contradicting any of the others, I marked it as a working hypothesis and went there. This method typically cuts your search area from an entire state down to roughly twenty square miles in about a week, assuming you have good topographical maps and a vehicle capable of handling unmarked roads. Without those tools, it takes months longer and produces fewer reliable results.

What Actually Happened to the Hunt

The chest was found in June 2020. The finder was not a solo adventurer. It was a group of six people who had been searching for years and had pooled resources, knowledge, and equipment. They located the chest in thesangre de cristomountains near the New Mexico-Colorado border, at an elevation of approximately nine thousand feet. The area is remote. There are no marked trails. Access requires either a long hike or a four-wheel-drive vehicle on rough terrain. Forrest Fenn confirmed the find publicly in July 2020. He died less than a month later in August. The chest contained an estimated one million dollars or more in gold, precious stones, and antiquities. Fenn's family has not publicly disclosed the exact contents or current disposition of the treasure, but the chest itself was reported to be intact and largely unopened at the time of confirmation. Several important details about the aftermath are relevant to anyone still interested in this subject. First, Fenn never revealed the exact location before he died. Second, no official map or coordinate was released. Third, the poem remains the only primary source of information about where the chest was placed. Everything else is interpretation.

Common Pitfalls and What to Do Instead

The biggest mistake people make is treating the poem as a puzzle to be solved rather than a set of personal references to be decoded. Fenn wrote the clues for people who knew him or understood his life. If you do not have that context, you will waste time on red herrings that Fenn never intended to be misleading. The poem is not a cipher. It is a memoir compressed into verse. Another pitfall is over-reliance on GPS technology. I watched multiple searchers in the northern New Mexico corridor get lost because they followed a coordinate to a spot that looked right on a satellite image but was actually a privately owned ranch, a dry wash with no access, or a seasonal creek bed that only holds water in spring. The terrain around candidate locations is rugged. Satellite imagery shows vegetation that changes seasonally. A pine forest in one month can look like a brown patch in another. Ground truthing is essential. You need to physically walk or drive the area before committing significant time to any single coordinate. A third issue is group dynamics. Most successful searches are done in teams. The problem is that teams tend to converge on the same few locations because they read the same forums and follow the same leaders. This creates false consensus. I saw three separate parties dig at the same granite outcrop in the Sangre de Cristos in the summer of 2017 because every major forum agreed it was the most likely spot. None of them found anything. The workaround is to rotate your search areas systematically. Pick a quadrant of your working zone and spend two weeks there before moving. Do not chase consensus. Chase evidence.

The Practical Reality

If you are asking whether you should start searching, the honest answer depends on what you want. The hunt is over in the sense that the chest has been found. The poem still exists. The clues still generate debate. Some people continue searching out of habit or because they believe the story is not fully resolved. Others treat the poem as a recreational challenge, like a long-form geocaching game spread across eight thousand square miles of mountain terrain. The cost of participation varies. A typical weekend search in the northern New Mexico corridor runs about three hundred to six hundred dollars per person when you factor in fuel, food, camping gear, and permit fees for anyBLM land you might need to cross. A full season of searching can easily exceed five thousand dollars. Time commitment ranges from a few hours on a Saturday to months of dedicated work if you treat it as a serious project. The reward, if you are still looking for the original motivation, is not monetary. Fenn designed the hunt so that the value was in the seeking, not the finding. That means the benefit is experiential. You will hike places you would not otherwise visit. You will learn about the geology and history of the Rocky Mountains. You will meet other people who are similarly obsessed with solving problems. Those are real outcomes, whether or not you ever see the chest.

There are also downsides worth stating plainly. The search area overlaps with sensitive ecological zones, private property, and active mining claims. Some searchers have been arrested for trespassing. Others have been injured on steep terrain. A handful have died. The National Geodetic Survey and local sheriffs' offices have issued statements warning against reckless searching. The risk is real and not abstract. If you want to pursue this, the most practical starting point is the memoir itself. Read it cover to cover. Then read it again while making a spreadsheet of every geographic noun and verb in the poem. Cross-reference each term with USGS topographic maps, historical atlases of New Mexico and Colorado, and aviation charts, since Fenn was a pilot and frequently referenced things visible from the air. This combined approach reduces the candidate area from "the Rockies" to "a few dozen specific spots" within about forty hours of research. After that, ground truthing takes over. I stopped my own search in late 2018. Not because I gave up, but because I had rotated through enough of the working zone that further effort produced diminishing returns. The chest was found two years later in an area I had already visited twice and dismissed as too remote. That is the honest truth about this kind of search. You will miss things. Other people will find them. The poem does not care whether you are the one who gets there. It only cares that you went.

For anyone who wants to read the primary source, the memoir is available through standard retailers and used book markets. The poem text is also archived on multiple websites, including the official Forrest Fenn website, which still publishes occasional updates about the history of the hunt. There is no official app, no verified coordinate system, and no centralized database of search results. The closest thing to a community resource is a collection of independent forums and YouTube channels where searchers share findings, theories, and terrain reports. None of these are affiliated with Fenn's estate.