This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. And each time I go to the Rockies searching, I spend about a thousand or $2,000 on gas and accommodation.” But, Neitzel says, “If I desperately needed the money, I wouldn’t be able to afford to go looking for it.” We’re talking about months of time I’ve devoted to it.
THE THRILL OF THE CHASE TREASURE FREE
“I have no idea, but for the past three years I guess this has eaten up just about every free moment I have. “I’m not a very good accountant,” he says, laughing. The 65-year-old former television cameraman isn’t sure how much time or money he has devoted to hunting for the treasure. Neitzel is just one of hundreds of people who have contacted Fenn to let him know they have been searching for his haul.
Fenn’s latest book, Too Far to Walk, is about to be published, and he says it could offer treasure seekers more clues to help lead them to the chest. Earlier this year, a producer on long-running American morning television programme The Today Show read an article about Fenn in an in-flight magazine, and Fenn’s subsequent appearance led to a dramatic increase in orders for his book. The book, which is only available through one bookshop in downtown Santa Fe, sold steadily, but it wasn’t until 2013 that Fenn’s treasure attracted national attention. “There must be a few Indiana Jones types out there, like me, ready to throw a bedroll in the pickup and start searching,” he wrote. In 2010 he self-published a book, The Thrill of the Chase, a memoir packed with clues and a poem leading to the treasure chest.
“It had been so much fun building my collection over the decades,” he later wrote, “why not let others come searching for some of it while I’m still here?” In the event, it took him more than 20 years to go through with the plan, by which time his cancer was long-gone. In 1988, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer and the prognosis was grim: he figured he had about a year to live, and that’s when Fenn started to formulate a plan to bury some of the treasure he’d acquired over the years, leaving clues to its whereabouts. There must be a few Indiana Jones types out there, like me, ready to throw a bedroll in the pickup and start searchingĪn inveterate raconteur with an infectious chuckle, Fenn was a familiar face in Santa Fe, where he’d lived with his wife, Peggy, since the Seventies.
Deliberately vague, it apparently included nine cryptic but vital clues, including: “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.” The author of the poem was an elderly Texan art dealer named Forrest Fenn. Neitzel was led to the haul by a short six-stanza poem.