This article was originally published in November 2020. It is now the basis of a Netflix docuseries, Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure.

Growing up in Arizona in the 1990s, Justin Posey wanted to be Indiana Jones. At age 9, he started wearing the archaeologist-adventurer’s trademark khaki pants, Stetson, and leather jacket and carrying a bullwhip nearly every day. When other kids bullied him, his mother gently suggested he dress more normally. “He wouldn’t have any part of it,” his mother, Lorri, remembers. He carried the whip until he was 13. “I got pretty good with that thing,” he says. “Of course, they wouldn’t let me bring it to school.”

Posey’s parents were both railroad engineers, and during summers at the family’s cabin in Montana, where his grandfather was a fish-and-game warden, his favorite thing to do was get out in the hills with a metal detector. He collected books of magic and magicians’ biographies and devoted himself to demystifying illusions like levitation, sleight of hand, and escapes, which he performed in his sixth-grade talent show. He tore apart his mother’s new computer (and put it back together in the face of her fury) and built himself one from off-the-shelf parts. He had a book about the Spanish conquistadores and their long-buried treasure, and with his younger brothers, he recalls, he would “forge out on our own across the desert outside of Tucson in search of hidden loot.”

When Posey was 11, he became obsessed with the Victorio Peak treasure, a hoard of perhaps thousands of gold bars supposedly found by a hunter named Milton Noss in a hilltop cavern in New Mexico in 1937. Before Noss was able to recover most of the gold he had seen, the shaft leading to it caved in; after World War II, the U.S. government seized the whole area, adding it to the White Sands Missile Range. “This concept that there could be, around the corner, a vast fortune with an unimaginable historical context was just enthralling,” Posey says. He learned everything he could about it, even attending a summit held by descendants of Noss. He joined tours of the missile range, cooking up schemes to peel off from the group and sneak away to the treasure site. “That was the agonizing part,” he recalls. “I felt I could do this, but the physical barriers made it all the worse. It consumed the majority of my childhood.”

Years later, in 2012, when Posey was 29, his wife, Jennie, emailed him a Newsweek article about a different treasure. Hidden in “the mountains north of Santa Fe,” the treasure sounded almost fantastical — diamonds, rubies, and sapphires; gold coins, gold nuggets, a 17th-century Spanish ring. The key to finding the treasure lay in a 24-line poem in a self-published memoir, The Thrill of the Chase, by Forrest Fenn, the wealthy 82-year-old eccentric who had hidden it. Fenn, who estimated the treasure to be worth more than $1 million, said he hid it to motivate people to put down their digital devices and get out into nature. He was still alive and willing to engage with searchers. The hunt was free; the purse was big. The poem’s puzzle could theoretically be solved by anyone.

By then, Posey was living in Redmond, Washington. His childhood interest in puzzles and illusions had evolved into a fascination with ciphers and algorithms; he was now a computer scientist working on complex software problems for a tech giant. “I figured, How many times in a person’s lifetime are you going to be in a position to hunt for something you’re reasonably sure is actually there,” he says, “and the person who hid it is still alive?”

By the time the preteen Posey was getting interested in Victorio Peak, Fenn, then in his early 60s, was already a notorious figure in New Mexico. After a career as an Air Force pilot — in Vietnam, he said, he flew 328 combat missions and was shot down twice — he moved to Santa Fe and prospered as an art dealer trading in Native American artifacts and cowboy paintings. Fenn sold to people like Ralph Lauren, Suzanne Somers, and Michael Douglas. His gallery and the garden around it, which was patrolled by Fenn’s pet alligators, Beowulf and Elvis, became a popular stop on Santa Fe art tours.

Fenn’s bent for self-promotion and his populist attitude toward art chafed the town’s purists. In his Santa Fe home, he surrounded himself with relics, including what he said was Sitting Bull’s peace pipe and a flask of brandy that had belonged to Jackie Kennedy. At his gallery off Canyon Road, according to his memoir, he would invite visiting schoolkids to wash their hands and touch whatever they liked, including, on one occasion, Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington. “The teacher was horrified,” recalls Marc Howard, a Santa Fe jeweler who got to know Fenn in the 1990s.

Forrest Fenn claimed the location of his treasure was encoded in these verses.

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.

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.

From there it’s no place for the meek,
The end is ever drawing nigh;
There’ll be no paddle up your creek,
Just heavy loads and water high.

If you’ve been wise and found the blaze
Look quickly down, your quest to cease,
But tarry scant with marvel gaze,
Just take the chest and go in peace.

So why is it that I must go
And leave my trove for all to seek?
The answers I already know,
I’ve done it tired, and now I’m weak.

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.

Fenn took a roguish approach to life and to facts. “It doesn’t matter who you are; it only matters who they think you are,” he once said. Linda Durham, who interned with Fenn before going on to found her own contemporary-art gallery, recalls seeing an Egyptian sarcophagus displayed at Fenn Gallery with a sign that read DEACCESSIONED FROM THE BRITISH MUSEUM. She knew this to be a fiction. By sheer coincidence, the case had once belonged to her: A customer had given it to her when she was an Egyptology-interested Playboy Bunny. She’d had it X-rayed, and she knew it contained a mummified baby crocodile. After she sold it to a private collector, it eventually found its way to Fenn. When she pointed out that the British Museum story was false, he became angry. “He had no idea where that came from,” Durham says.

In the late 1980s, Fenn sold his gallery and bought the Pueblo San Lazaro, a National Historic Landmark south of Santa Fe, which he spent the next few decades personally excavating to the outrage of much of the New Mexico archaeological community. Fenn had little patience for archaeologists’ preoccupation with context — where an object was found and its position relative to the objects around it. The thing itself was, for him, everything. Over the years, he would have skirmishes with preservation groups, Native American communities, museums, and the federal government. (Eventually, as part of a massive investigation into the illegal antiquities trade, the FBI raided his house, but he was never indicted.) “Forrest was just a rascal,” says David Hurst Thomas, a senior curator at the American Museum of Natural History, “what you see in the Native American oral literature all the time about the trickster coyote.”

Objects were immortal to Fenn, and he was constantly hiding them. He would secrete an aspen leaf in a book and sign it so that in the future someone would find the leaf and smile. He cast a series of heavy bronze jars to contain his 20,000-word unpublished autobiography and buried them in the wilderness to await discovery by a stranger one or 1,000 years hence.

In 1988, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer. “He thought it was going to kill him,” recalls the author Douglas Preston, who lives in Santa Fe and became Fenn’s good friend. Fenn’s father, stricken with pancreatic cancer, had chosen to spare his family the agony of a drawn-out death and taken 50 sleeping pills, killing himself in his home. Fenn decided to do the same thing — but with a twist. He already had in mind a remote final resting place; he was going to go there with a bottle of pills and a chest full of treasure. He would write a puzzle poem and leave it behind, so that, as Preston says, “anyone who found the grave would be welcome to rob it.” Fenn began drafting the poem and assembling the trove.

Improbably, Fenn recovered from the cancer, but he decided to hide the treasure anyway, unaccompanied by his bones. Often, when Preston visited, Fenn would take him into his walk-in vault and show him the latest configuration of booty. “He took stuff out and put stuff in,” Preston remembers. “He was having a lot of fun thinking about what was going to be in that chest.” Early versions contained antique silver and gold watches and gemstones, including an amethyst, a topaz, and a star ruby. Fenn added a bunch of $1,000 bills. Then he removed them, realizing they would rot over time.

One of Fenn’s concerns was how he would know whether the treasure had been found, should that occur in his lifetime. He pondered various strategies, at one point including a document (a bearer bond or bank letter in an amount Preston recalls as $100,000) that a finder would need to present at a bank, triggering Fenn’s notification. Then Fenn removed that, too, figuring that banks might no longer be around to honor the obligation. He ended up putting something else in the chest, an unknown item he never revealed to anyone, which would somehow let him know when the treasure was discovered.

Preston wrote a thriller, The Codex, inspired by Fenn’s planned self-entombment, and Fenn continued to refine his poem. Preston recalls that, after reading a draft, “I said, ‘You know, Forrest, there are a lot of smart people in the world, smarter than you think. It would be a tragedy if you issued this poem and three days later the treasure was found.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, I think it will take 900 years to find the treasure.’ ” When Preston visited Fenn in August 2010 and asked about the treasure, “he said to me, ‘It’s gone. I’ve hidden it. It’s done.’ And that was the beginning.”

Within a few days of learning about the treasure, Justin Posey ordered a copy of Fenn’s memoir and devoured it. The search had officially been going on for two years but was only now beginning to draw media attention outside the region. The poem consists of six four-line stanzas. The second of these reads, “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.” It was so vague as to be almost endlessly interpretable — and that was if you thought the search area was limited to New Mexico, as many early searchers did. Posey thought the potential area was much larger, since “the mountains north of Santa Fe” could apply to the entire range of the Rockies. He felt the key to narrowing the universe of possible solutions lay in studying Fenn and the places that were special to him. In his memoir, Fenn revealed a strong sentimental attachment to Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding area, where he had spent many summer days as a youth fly-fishing on the Madison River. “Yellowstone — that’s where my heart is,” Fenn wrote. Posey thought he had a pretty good chance of solving the puzzle. “You read this thing, you say, ‘By golly, I know exactly where it’s at.’ ”

Begin it where warm waters halt: The Yellowstone area abounds with hydrothermal activity, and Posey soon homed in on Boiling River, where a hot spring flows into the Gardner River near the border of Wyoming and Montana. In one of his books, Fenn had described bathing in a similar body of water as a child and moving strategically around the river to warm up or cool off.

In June 2013, as soon as the Yellowstone season began, Posey and Jennie drove there from Washington State. They arrived just as trails were beginning to open. Even then, there was still snow on the ground. Posey quickly realized that Google Earth was no substitute for visiting a place. In satellite photos, “the canyons seemed more expansive, the rivers more foreboding, but that just wasn’t the reality,” he says. Boiling River wasn’t as grand or as intricate as he had expected; it seemed too simple.

Posey realized he would need to devote more time to the puzzle. Having made two two-week trips to Montana near the Wyoming border that first season, he searched for 60 days the following one. After Boiling River, Posey tried to stay “state agnostic.” He searched a wide variety of areas in Montana and Wyoming — and, for one season, in New Mexico. He spent almost no time in Colorado, which he felt had the lowest probability. “Mainly because Forrest has effectively never mentioned anything about it,” he told me. “A lot of people felt that was a clue right there, that he didn’t want to slip up, so he completely omits it. I felt that Forrest was more brazen than that.”

At each site, Posey tried to be as methodical as possible, mapping out a grid pattern to ensure he didn’t miss a spot. He usually hiked with a long-range drone; when he got back to his hotel room at night, he would pore over the footage for details he might have missed. Sometimes he would get to a new area and immediately know it wasn’t right:........

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