Spoiler alert: This story contains a major twist in the new Netflix series Greed & Gold: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure, a docuseries based on the New York Magazine story “The Great 21st-Century Treasure Hunt,” by Benjamin Wallace.

In late summer of 2020, when most people I knew were still keeping their social distance, I attended a gathering of treasure hunters in the town of West Yellowstone, Montana. Very few of them were wearing masks. These were people who’d spent up to ten years looking for a bronze chest hidden somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. It contained, among other things, gold nuggets, a 24-karat-gold bracelet with a dragon head at each end, and a sealed glass olive jar containing the 20,000-word memoir of Santa Fe art dealer Forrest Fenn, the man who’d hidden the treasure. It was thought to be worth at least $1 million.

The hunt had begun in 2010 when Fenn published a poem containing nine clues to the treasure’s location. But now it was over. In June, Fenn had announced that the treasure had been found by an unnamed “man from back East.”

I went to Yellowstone expecting to meet a group of dedicated treasure hounds having one last hurrah, and there was some of that. I heard inspiring stories about families who had reunited through searching and about the hunters coming together to support each other.

But I also found a community struggling with a lot of unanswered questions. Who was the finder? Where had he found the treasure? How had he succeeded where tens of thousands of others had not? What would they do with their lives now? The news was particularly hard for Justin Posey, who had spent 780 days hunting for the treasure and had even trained his vizsla, Tucker, to smell bronze at depths up to four feet.

The saga was also shadowed by accusations that Fenn had played favorites with some female treasure hunters and given them hints that he hadn’t shared publicly. There were lawsuits — at least a half-dozen have been filed — claiming underhandedness of one sort or another. Two months later, Fenn died at age 90, which did nothing to extinguish the controversy.

I chronicled this messy denouement in New York’s article, but the conspiracy theories didn’t abate. Jack Stuef, a medical student and former writer for Wonkette, was eventually revealed as the finder, but he wouldn’t divulge where or how he’d found the treasure, beyond saying that it had been in a “nook,” covered, from the passage of time, by natural debris. Now people wondered whether Stuef and Fenn had been in cahoots somehow.

And Fenn never revealed the location of the treasure beyond saying it was in Wyoming. Adding to the mystery, after the treasure was found, according to Posey, Fenn, on his lawyer’s advice, recorded a video in which he explained each of the nine clues in his puzzle poem. “That is something that, to my knowledge, the Fenn Estate has to this day,” says Posey.

Some of the more fervent treasure hunters have continued to obsess over the unanswered questions. A hunter named Rudy Greene grid-searched Nine Mile Hole, a fishing spot on the Madison River, in Yellowstone National Park, and found what appears to be a very distinctive twig that was present in photos Stuef took when he first found the treasure chest — thereby seeming to pinpoint the precise spot where the chest had been buried. Posey ultimately formed an LLC with partners to privately buy the treasure from Stuef.

The hunt is the subject of a new Netflix documentary, Gold & Greed, which, over three hourlong episodes, tracks a handful of the most dedicated treasure hunters, including Posey. And the series adds a new twist: Posey has now launched his own Fenn-style treasure hunt by publishing a memoir, Beyond the Map’s Edge, with a puzzle poem containing clues to his treasure’s hiding place, and embedding additional clues in his scenes in the documentary without specifying how or where to the producers.

I caught up with him as the documentary release date approached and after he’d watched the series. He was generally thrilled with how it had turned out but was bothered that “it portrays me as single-handedly going out and finding this Nine Hole location, specifically, and there were many more people involved in that. Everything that Rudy Greene did was astounding; I don’t know if it ever would have been found without him.”

You spent, by your calculation, 780 days looking for the Fenn treasure, then someone other than you found it. Did you experience something like postpartum depression?
I mean, there’s certainly the full dynamic range of emotions, and I think that first summer after it had been found, I was feeling a........

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