Treasure chasers look to weather for clues on mystery treasure site

On a cool October day in 2020, the weight of reality pressed hard around the world. The United States was bracing for the flu season amid the COVID-19 pandemic with still no vaccines in sight. The 2020 presidential election was on the horizon and Hurricane Delta, the season's third major hurricane, was also making news headlines.

But for a moment, reality seemed to blur into a fairytale for Daniel Barbarisi.

Sitting before him on the conference room table was a bronze Romanesque lockbox, dating back to around 1150 A.D., carvings of Gothic art adorning its sides and top.

"Ten by ten by five, worn and weathered and perfect," Barbarisi described in his newly released book "Chasing the Thrill: Obsession, Death and Glory in America's Most Extraordinary Treasure Hunt."

A treasure hunter himself and now a senior editor at The Athletic, Barbarisi had been one of the first to get in touch with the finder of Forrest Fenn's treasure, Jack Steuf. After messaging back and forth, Steuf had invited Barbarisi to see the treasure for himself.

For around a decade, the bronze box and the treasure it held, estimated to be worth more than $1 million, sat somewhere out in the Rocky Mountains, exposed to the elements, its content curated and tucked away by art dealer and author Forrest Fenn. A self-published book of short stories from his life, including a poem with nine clues, served as the treasure map, and the challenging weather and terrain its wardens. At least five people died while out looking for Fenn's treasure.

"A lot of that has to do with the elements," Barbarisi told AccuWeather in a Zoom interview. "Not all of them, but there were several examples of people who did not fully understand the ramifications of going out in certain areas in [certain] times of year."

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The chase came to an end in early June of 2020, however, when Steuf found the elusive blaze somewhere in the mountains of Wyoming and looked down.

"If you've been wise and found the blaze, look quickly down, your quest to cease," the poem goes, giving no further details as to what the blaze was or even what it was on. Whatever it was though, it was clear that the "blaze" was the "x" that marked the spot.

"I could tell that there was something on the ground, or something that was just above the ground that had debris on it," Stuef told Barbarisi in his book. "And you could tell that it was roughly the shape of the square top of the treasure chest."

The finder, Jack Steuf, and Forrest Fenn never released the location at which the treasure had been hidden, nor did they reveal any meaning behind the clues.

Three photos of the treasure were released in June by Fenn, however, a move that inspired some chasers to try and gain some insight into the destination of the poem.

From the ground up

Some treasure chasers have turned to analyzing photographs of the treasure after it was found, trying to narrow down the elusive hiding spot by any tells from the weather it may have experienced.

"When you hide a treasure chest out in the wilderness for 10 years, I think there's a lot of unanticipated circumstances that are going to arise," Barbarisi said.

Looking over the treasure, Barbarisi got a glimpse of gold in various forms, a necklace that is more than 1,000 years old, a golden dragon bracelet encrusted in emeralds and rubies and diamonds -- all after a decade of being outdoors in the Rocky Mountains.

Fenn had stored some of the items in cases, but Barbarisi said that essentially plastic baggies held others.

"Those items over time became extremely vulnerable to the elements to some extent," Barbarisi said. "[But] they were protected. They were actually not damaged, incredibly, while out there, but certainly areas of the chest were filled with water, and some of the bags that contained some of the more valuable items were also filled with water [when they were found]."

The chest itself had some wear and tear, Barbarisi added, and it was around the environmental meddling that treasure chasers tried piecing together details of the location -- literally from the ground up.

Matthew DeMoss, having been one of the treasure chasers, created a handful of videos to interact with the treasure-chasing community. In a few of those videos, he goes over theories on where the treasure could have been hidden based on photographs of the chest after it had endured a decade of weather.

In a video he created to interact with other chasers of the Fenn treasure, he highlighted what a soil engineer had observed of the environment.

"The ground in the chest photo doesn't look like it gets much wind," he had told DeMoss. "The debris is neither swept away nor piled up. It looks relatively protected, in a stand of pine trees. Note that the forest litter is not accumulated deep. It is maybe up to an inch of litter over stable flat ground."

Soil and root fragments in the chest drew debate over whether the treasure had actually been set down and left alone, or buried, which would have not only made it more difficult to spot but would have contrasted Fenn's statement that he had left the treasure on the ground and walked away.

"Forest could have placed the chest on the ground, then covered the whole thing in a mound of soil. Snowmelt and rain would still tend to work the soil between the lid and the rim," the soil engineer told DeMoss.

While DeMoss was quick to note to AccuWeather that there wasn't much in the photo unique to any specific location in the Rockies that had been noticed, he theorized that perhaps a decade out in the elements had aided in concealing the treasure.

Fenn hadn't buried the treasure, but Steuf told Barbarisi Fenn had hidden it in what he had called a nook, a depression in the uneven ground, covered in debris.

And if weather and environmental factors could help hide it, could they also provide a clue as to where the treasure had been hidden?

Steuf noted that the blaze had been damaged, though didn't provide much detail past that. But for DeMoss and other chasers, it was a foothold.

"He [Fenn] intended for it to last for a while, so maybe something naturally occurring on a rock or something he created on a rock," DeMoss theorized. The thought has led to scanning seismic activity in the Yellowstone area, looking through National Park data and looking for notes of rockslides.

He added it was possible that a forest fire wasn't out of the question for what may have damaged the blaze. But running with the theory that seismic activity followed by a rockslide occurred, DeMoss has narrowed his search to areas that have seen similar events between 2010 and 2018, when Steuf first went searching for the treasure -- and likely overlooked it.

Braving the elements

Weather has always been an integral part of the chase, from possibly obscuring the treasure from the immediate view to more direct impacts such as limiting searches.

"The weather doesn't care about the treasure chest," Barbarisi said. "The weather doesn't care about us... and we have to put ourselves in the right position to go explore."

Barbarisi himself had been caught off guard by hail in New Mexico while the hunt was still on, and DeMoss cut his search in June a day short due to bad weather.

DeMoss left Yellowstone on June 4. Steuf found the treasure on June 6.

For Carrie Findlay and her family of six, wildfires in both 2017 and 2020 barred them from exploring the areas they had in mind. True to the year's character, 2020 set up its own challenges for the family while on their last treasure hunt in Yellowstone in the form of a truck hitting their RV's side mirror, shattering the driver's window.

Nobody was hurt, but Findlay told AccuWeather, that incident created a "domino effect" for the rest of their stay, as no place in the area had replacement windows.

"This trip we encountered fires, blizzards, hail, rain, I mean you name it," Findlay said. "It turns on a dime and you can't prepare for it."

While treasure hunting in practice had its own challenges, Findlay was able to incorporate different aspects into homeschooling her four kids.

"We looked at things that maybe we wouldn't have looked at that was in our typical science book or typical history book," Findlay said. "... I think the kids really got into it and really enjoyed being able to look at some of those different aspects and then arriving there and seeing how it all comes together and how it works.

Weather patterns were included not just in their studies, but also in Findlay's solves, particularly with the line that is believed to hold the first clue, "Begin it where warm waters halt."

"We just kept going back to... if there was an area in the Rockies that was very well-known to pilots or weather personnel for fog settling," Findlay said.

While other treasure hunts around the world continue, Fenn's treasure, as Barbarisi confirmed back in October with the contents of the bronze chest laid out before him, had been found. For some, like Barbarisi, closure was also found with the knowledge that the treasure was no longer tucked away somewhere in the Rockies. But for others like DeMoss, the chase, now for the damaged blaze that once guarded the bronze box, continues.

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