My wife and I went to visit him early last fall and what we found when we got there was rain; It was the kind of rain that, if it occurred in Santa Fe, would find its way through every flat roof, skylight, and foundation in the county—even those featured in back issues of Architectural Digest.  It had been raining for weeks, it continued to rain while we were there and it rained steadily until after we were gone.

In my long career as a more or less observant itinerant, I have discovered that rural folk, especially those in the southern hemisphere, don’t worry about being out in the rain while urban folk, especially those in the northern hemisphere, spend a lot of time trying to get away from it—the rain, I mean. The exceptions to this last rule seem always to be little kids and their grandfathers.

So, when things seemed to get a bit tense for those of us stuffed into a closed-up space, I would ask my young partner if he wanted to go for a walk in the rain. The response was an immediate break for the door; but only after we donned our raingear (T-shirts, shorts and sandals) were we allowed to go outside.

He loved the puddles; but a close second was when I would lift him up so that he could pull a crab apple off a tree and the pull would release of torrent of large drops that got into his eyes, nose and ears making him squeal for more.

And then we saw the mushrooms: zillions of them in all colors and sizes. To be honest, I’m no mycologist but I do recognize a half dozen or so that are very good eating; and I know enough not to sample the others.  I wondered if he knew anything about mycology.

Sure, the kid was only 16 months old but what the heck, it’s never too soon to learn about mushrooms and neither his mother nor his grandmother were there to say “no,” so under my tutelage, before long he could easily tell the difference between a mushroom and a pinecone, between a mushroom and dog doo-doo, and between a mushroom and a Bud Lite can. I have no doubt that he could easily have mastered their scientific names as well except that, like the rest of us, he had trouble saying that weird Latin “æ” sound.

All of this probably makes no sense unless you know that a friend and I had gone out earlier in the year to look for “Brown.”  We had set up camp and a very nice campground lady came by to make sure we hadn’t placed the tent door over an ant hill and she told us that Game and Fish had recently “shocked” the stream and discovered several “Browns” of 36 inches and pointed us in the right direction. After about an hour of hiking up the trail that followed the stream, we sat down to rest and I took out my binoculars to see if I could spot an eagle, an elk or someone else looking for Forrest Fenn’s treasure. Nothing.  What I did see though, was a fairly large pool at the end of a lengthy ripple in the stream about thirty yards below us.  And in that pool was absolutely the largest trout I had ever seen outside of the “Macho Pond” at the fish hatchery north of Pecos.

My friend immediately went down to count coup while I watched from above. To make a long story short, I will leave out the part where I took a nap while my friend did his best imitation of “nija fishing,” and say only that 36-inch trout do not get to be 36-inch trout because they are stupid.

On our way back we ran into a number of cows in a small meadow and while my friend busily practiced his dry-fly casting, I decided to take the “world’s most awesome photograph” of a cow. It was when I zoomed out to include some of the landscape that I noticed the meadow was full of soccer balls.

Except they weren’t. What they were, were Calvatia gigantea, the giant puffball; a royal member of the Lycoperdacæ family and a choice edible. There were enough mushrooms in that meadow to have fed Napoleon’s army with soupe aux champignons throughout his whole campaign.

And now you want to know where they are. No way. Mushroom finds are secrets more tightly held than are the solutions to any of Forrest Fenn’s most difficult clues. You will have to find your own. 

Happæ hunting,

r/

Ben C. de Baca (Richard E. Saunier)

My grandson, whom I introduced to you in the last post, is now totally into the alphabet.  I know this because the day after Christmas, the floor of our old adobe was covered with alphabetical blocks, alphabetical trains, alphabetical alphabets and alphabetical animals (“A” is for alligator, “B” is for buffalo …. etc.) and he, like you, has now identified the Pirates “X” on Forrest Fenn’s MAP as an “X”.  I swear, because of his new fluency in “alphabetical animals,” I fully expect him to be teaching me the Systema Naturae of Carl Linnaeus by spring.

Unlike you, however, he has not tried to figure out just where that “X” on THE MAP is on the ground. I must say that it’s placement was an enigma to me as well until my lovely wife, who is a hostess at the Book, Map and Photo Store of the New Mexico History Museum (where she calls everybody “Hon” but DOES NOT wear short pink dresses and a hair net) brought back a copy of a map that looks somewhat like THE MAP on page 133 of The Thrill of the Chase only it is much less fuzzy and a whole lot more colorful; all of which makes the “X” become totally clear and its location instantly knowable.

Now, for those of you who are interested, the coordinates for that “X” are 36°00’46.82”N and 105°31’49.40”W—except that they aren’t. You see, I got those coordinates using a useless plug-in for Google Maps that must have been invented by a wannabe Google engineer working out of his mother’s storm cellar in Temple, Texas. He won’t make it.

If you want to know the real coordinates, you must use Google Earth, which now gives its own coordinates for any spot on the Globe.  The spot we are looking for is at 36°00’39.98”N and 105°31’36.60”W which is not really an “X” at all. Rather, it is the place where the invisible dividing line between Rio Arriba and Taos counties butts up against the invisible Mora county line for three arms of the “X” with the fourth arm being an all too real ridge coming off of a 12,000 foot-high mountain in the Pecos Wilderness.

If, by any chance you still want to go there, take the “Divide Trail” (Forest Service Trail 36 via Forest Service Trail 27) which starts at the Santa Barbara campground and then takes you on a route that is kind of northy-southy over Jicarita Peak (12,835 feet elevation) and on to the ridge in question which would eventually lead you to a small peak of unknown elevation but whose name, as far as I can tell, is “Trouble”—really, that is what the map says. It would take the most storied star athlete from Taos, even one who is high on caffeine and riding a mule, a week just to get there.  I am sure that it has been a while since our favorite mountain man and potential benefactor has made that trip.

However. If, once you are there, you take one or two very careful steps to the east, you can peek over the edge of a multi-hundred foot drop straight down to the easily reached “North Fork Lake.” What if maybe the “X” isn’t exactly located at 36°00’39.98”N and 105°31’36.60”W but a few horizontal and a great many vertical feet to the east?  Furthermore, you should know that this lake feeds the Rio de las Casas, a tributary of the Mora River which flows “canyon down” right through one of my favorite places in all of New Mexico: Loma Parda!

You want more? My guess is that most everybody in New Mexico, maybe even Forrest Fenn, knows that “Loma Parda” is Spanish for “Brown Hill!” Not only that, one of the most famous hot springs in New Mexico is just a short jaunt south of Loma Parda at Montezuma!

Regrettably though, these observations are all backwards; the clues cited above need to go the other way. You begin with “warm water,” then you go down the canyon, and then you put in below the home of brown—not the reverse.  Not only that, but Loma Parda is not even the “home of Brown.” It is the home of a whole lot of snakes (some of which rattle), a herd of passing buffalo from the Wind River Ranch, and Ben C. de Baca, the ghost town’s only living human occupant.

No matter, Loma Parda is worth the trip. Ben, whose great grandfather and great uncle ran the “Loma Parda Hotel and Taxi Service” back when the town was really jumping, is a man with a barrel of really, really good stories.  And he will tell them to you over a free soda-pop and maybe a tomal or two if he has recently been into town. Turns out that Loma Parda’s sole reason for existence was as the brothel for the soldiers at old Fort Union.

Stay the course,  /r

And a remarkable little kid he is. For example, whenever he tired of trying to convince me in English that he absolutely had to have another cookie, he resorted to ASL (American Sign Language) thinking, no doubt, that the battery must have gone dead in my hearing aid.

I will give a whole lot more detail on his numerous achievements as well as his suggestions as to how we should interpret the clues of Forrest Fenn in later postings. This one, however, is about how he influenced the discovery of the secrets hidden in THE MAP.

When we met the two of them (favorite daughter-in-law and grandson) down at the airport in Albuquerque the day they arrived, my daughter-in-law asked me how I was doing. I said, ”Fine. I’m going to be a millionaire just as soon as I decipher THE MAP on page 133 of Forrest Fenn’s memoir, The Thrill of the Chase.”

Her response, as I remember it, was something like, “Yeah. Right.” Then, slowly shaking her head, she turned away, hugged my wife and handed her our grandson.

I sat in the rear seat on the way back to Santa Fe from Albuquerque just so I could quiz my grandson on whether or not he understood anything that Sarah Palin had ever said, but as we left the garage my daughter-in-law offered him her I-Pad which he took and, even before we reached the garage pay-booth, he had the I-Pad opened and turned on, had selected what appeared to be his very own file, and was debating whether he should watch “Curious George meets Allie Oops” or something called “Bunny Hunt” which, as far as I could tell, had absolutely nothing to do with Hugh Hefner, Playboy, or the NRA.

Given that I had now been replaced by something I knew nothing about, a nap seemed appropriate. The trip home, therefore, was uneventful except from time to time my grandson would poke me, point to something on the monitor, look me in the eye and say what sounded very much like “Absáalooke pwat” whereupon I would nod, take his word for it, and go back to sleep.

On our arrival home, I asked my daughter-in-law if she wanted to see THE MAP. Her response, as I remember it, was something like, “What map?”

I once again explained that “I was about to be a millionaire just as soon as I deciphered THE MAP” and she asked me what the problem was. “It makes me dizzy,” I answered.

So we then went to my desk in the office where I shoved aside three or four loupes of various magnifications, wiped a spot of spaghetti sauce off the page opposite THE MAP and showed it to her (by which I mean THE MAP, not the spaghetti sauce.)

She took the book, opened it to page 133, held it at oh, about 15 inches in front of her nose for all of 12 seconds, handed it back to me, knelt down to grab hold of the diaper my grandson was wearing to keep him from the brownish colored apple-core that had been sitting beside my wastebasket for all of a week and said, “It’s a map of Northern New Mexico.”

Incredulous, I stood there looking at THE MAP for the seven hundred thirty-second time, squinted my eyes and, sure enough, it was.

Then, as she dashed out the office door to grab my now diaperless grandson in an unsuccessful attempt to keep him from pouring more cat food into the cat’s water bowl, she added, “And there is a Captain Kidd-like pirate “X” about an inch and a quarter above the top gold nugget.”

And, sure enough, there was.

Life is sweet.  Happy New Year one and all,

/r

Forrest Fenn's map in "The Thrill of the Chase."

I want you to know that I have looked at Forrest Fenn’s map on page 133 of The Thrill of the Chase for what seems like days, weeks, even months on end. Not that that is all bad, mind you. I love maps—even when they are of places I have never been or where, unfortunately, I will never go.

Maps help conjure up all kinds of great adventure stories and, in North America, the best ones to do that are the old antique maps made by those sometimes skilled, often self-taught cartographers of the early years of Manifest Destiny; of Lewis and Clark and the mapmakers that dutifully put to paper the names, words and places traveled by the mountain men, who, whether French, Spanish or Irish, had a way of describing the essence of a landscape that is lost on no one.

From Tetilla peak (Spanish) that I can see from my office window, to les Trois Tétons (French) of western Wyoming to . . . well, I don’t need to tell you about the Irish. You understand what I mean. These early travelers never lacked for realistic descriptions nor did they suffer a loss of imagination; and their vocabularies were very much those of uncommon common men.

But do I care for new, modern maps? Not so much. They all seem to be about ranches or farms sold to developers just so they could undo the ancient trails and traces—the very names of which tell of hardships and successes won only with great difficulty—and then saddle them with designations like “Lily Lane” or “Hibiscus.” Now the falls, cataracts and steep narrow canyons that were always dangerous encounters for those early travelers, are hidden by reservoirs and diversions that have destroyed the very personalities of rivers that for many hundreds of thousands of years molded the landscapes of which they are a part.

And what have I found in Forrest Fenn’s map after all this blinking and thinking?  Well, for one, it’s just about the fuzziest map I ever saw, and it makes me dizzy, and it doesn’t help matters when I use a magnifying glass. However, after a couple of months of eye-blinking and brow-mopping over THE MAP as it has come to be called in our house, an epiphany of sorts occurred right there in front of me while I was re-reading Mr. Fenn’s wonderful story about letting children touch the nose of George Washington in a very expensive painting of that very same George Washington, when one of the young ladies discovered that that George Washington was the reverse of the George Washington she had in her pocket!

I’ve no doubt that many of you have looked at that MAP for hours just like me. And it made you dizzy and you used a magnifying glass. But how many of you have scanned that MAP and then put it in Photoshop so that you could reverse and then sharpen it?

Aha! And now you want me to tell you what I discovered? Well, here it is and it won’t cost you a percentage of the take if you find the treasure because of it.

What I found was that if you scan the MAP and then reverse it in Photoshop and then sharpen it, you have an image resembling pretty much every mountain range and river in the United States west of Arkansas.

I am sorry about this. It’s not much of a Christmas present. But maybe I can make up for it in the next installment about that MAP which will be coming more or less soon (maybe). You see, it has, indeed, snowed up at Ski Santa Fe where you will be able to find me over the next few weeks.

Seasons Greetings and best wishes,

r/

But there was a problem and her name was Raylene Poe. I privately called her “Rosy Poesy” and she sat two seats in front and across the aisle from me.

It didn’t matter that I liked baseball and marbles and snowball fights and fishing like just about any other kid in class of my gender because mostly what I liked was recess and a good game of “chase” where I could almost catch her. The thing was, she was a couple of inches taller than me and that was mostly legs. She could outrun anybody.

She also had long curls that cascaded to just below her shoulders and her breath was a pure mixture of grape cool-aid, Red Hots and flour paste. And, of course, the spelling part was just to impress her. In all the other classes what I did mostly was dream.

My favorite of my two favorite dreams was where Rosy Poesy and I were married and had two children and a bicycle and we lived next to a baseball field where I played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and hit nothing but home runs and laid down really, really successful bunts. In the other one I dreamed that she would come over to my house so that we could build highways together in the dirt under our big elm tree. We would use my favorite “earth moving” equipment which consisted solely of a six inch piece off the end of a 2”x4” and a potato. Of course, I would let her use the 2”x4” because it made the best highways.

All this dreaming, however, meant that my arithmetic was horrible, my singing was worse, and my “cursive” suffered so much that the teacher made me stay after school and make little “o”s and then big “O”s in long straight lines and she watched to see that my elbow never touched the desk. But I shined in spelling class.

Then, on the very last day of that very same class, I was sitting there just looking at the back of her head when she turned around in her seat, gave me her best second-grader Jezebel smile, lifted her foot towards me and there on the sole of her shoe was printed “RP+RS”. I haven’t been able to spell since.

My guess is that Forrest Fenn had a similar experience only it was in “counting class” and if you want to know why I believe this, follow along as I highlight the nine clues in his now famous poem (page 132 in The Thrill of the Chase) in which he tells us just what we have to do to find his treasure.

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.

So there it is; a poem with nine clues except that, if you have been paying attention, you already know that there are 15 clues—not nine.

What, then, does this mean? Either Mr. Fenn had a similar experience as mine only in his “counting class” and there really are 15 clues or, he has pulled another Fensterism and we now must figure out just which of the 15 are the real nine. Going on a treasure hunt with Forrest Fenn seems always to be interesting; but it will never be easy.

Enjoy,

r/

Third wife of Kit Carson. 1828-1868 (Kit Carson Museum)

I couldn’t help but notice the naysayers who read and comment on the many articles describing Forrest Fenn’s treasure hunt. They are the doubters, skeptics and cynics who believe that Forrest Fenn is pulling our collective leg; that he has decided, as one of his last formal, public acts, to play us for fools rather than do what he says he has done—that is, to offer up a million dollar treasure to those willing to decipher his clues and go out looking.

I am somewhat torn by this bit of information. On the one hand, it means that fewer people will be searching for his treasure. And, on the other, it could also mean that we as a people have “developed” to where the kind of challenges offered by Mr. Fenn are seen as meaningless amusement and that wilderness no longer draws us from our comforts as it once did.  It means that the heroic/tragic tales of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea, of Joe Meek and Tom Fitzpatrick, of Kit Carson and Josefa Jaramillo and of Jim Bridger now molder unread in forgotten libraries and that we have lost something special.

There is no need either to question or to defend the honesty of Forrest Fenn. We need only to look at his motives and see what they say and, fortunately, The Thrill of the Chase has more clues about this part of Forrest Fenn than it has about how to find the treasure.  In short, despite a far above average biography, Forrest Fenn fears to leave this world as unknown and unremembered and the rediscovery of the life of Forrest Fenn in a hundred or a thousand years would be his ideal scenario.

We know this because he left a number of 20,000-word autobiographies in the bronze jars and bells he fabricated and hid around New Mexico and he fantasizes about his desire to have been buried along side his treasure chest. He is saddened that the name of his beloved father appears but once in a Google search along with the number of his burial plot in a small Texas town. He writes poignantly of a late night solo flight down the East Coast as he ruminates on our place in the Universe. He brings tears with an account of his accidental encounter with the grave of a French soldier in Vietnam who, without Maj. Fenn’s intervention, would have gone through eternity with no one to know or remember who he was, or how he died.

I have the same fears as Forrest Fenn; we all do. No matter what we profess to believe, what we know for sure, is that we will die and what will be left is our legacy and nothing more. And, for most of us, even that will soon fade away. Few of the billions of individual stories that have been played out here on Earth attain the levels of those reached by Moses, George Washington, Madam Curie or Steve Jobs. But we are all somebody. Our determination to hang on to that living uniqueness— even in death, is as strong as our desires for a great many other things—like, for example, a king’s ransom in gold and jewelry.  For me, it would be difficult not to believe that Forrest Fenn’s treasure chest is hidden out there somewhere.

Maybe though, the naysayers need a more practical answer as to why they should trust Forrest Fenn on this one. Let me provide that answer. Much of Mr. Fenn’s fortune obviously is in gold and jewelry rather than in Wall Street investments. What difference does it make then, if a part of his gold and jewelry is under his bed or hidden somewhere where he has every confidence that it will not soon be discovered?

Best wishes,

/r

If you have read Mr. Fenn’s memoir, The Thrill of the Chase, you know that he is the former owner of a very successful art gallery in Santa Fe, N.M., as well as a writer of books, a philanthropist, an amateur archeologist of note and a collector of many things—gold, knives, books, art, bottle caps and bits of string. Mostly, though, he collects the artifacts of early North American Indians of the Plains and the Rockies. He is a fly-fisherman and a lover of all things mountains—specifically the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. He is a pilot, a veteran of two wars, a risk-taker and a decorated hero; a ruggedly built gentleman with a friendly face and an immense curiosity; he has the imagination of a five-year old steadied with the discipline of a warrior. Other than a few aging National Park retirees, he is one of the few people now living in New Mexico who actually know who Osborne Russell was.

I am pretty sure that no one has ever called Forrest Fenn dumb—except for Forrest Fenn himself, a couple of “old biddies” from his youth, his teenage chum, Donnie Joe, and maybe his Spanish teacher. To be sure, according to his own statements, he slept through classes, barely made it out of high school and, overcome by a fit of foolhardiness, is now offering up a million dollars for the taking. On the other hand, he also flew close to 300 combat missions in one of the most complicated fighting machines ever built and, for a time, held a nuclear weapon in his care. He made a fortune in a very competitive business where he had no formal education or prior experience and then published half a dozen books on the subject. A diagnosis of ADHD has got to be in his files somewhere.

Consequently, when Forrest Fenn makes light of his education and mental faculties, he is using his considerable native intelligence to lull you to sleep, to win you over and then give you a thorough trouncing. Despite his being tossed from his unregistered space at Texas A&M and being twice shot out of the SouthEast Asian sky, I am guessing that Forrest Fenn has seldom been defeated at something he really wanted to win.

Mr. Fenn has a crafty side to him. His admitted sales philosophy is that of a game that he is going to win, not by cheating but by setting you up.   Some of his anecdotes in The Thrill of the Chase are examples of such behavior. He even offers a few surreptitious phrases in the very first chapters that explain exactly what he is up to: “I tend to use some words that aren’t in the dictionary, and others that are, I bend a little.” (p. 3), “Occasionally it’s wise for the fox to dress like the hound” (p. 7), “I never thought I had to believe every thing I said” (p. 14) and, later in a story called “Jump-starting the Learning Curve”, his father councils, “What we have learned is that you should always tell the truth, but you should not always tell ALL of the truth” (p. 26).

Thus, among the clues that he has given us, one must fully expect “clues” that are not what they seem at first reading. Perhaps the major clue in the entire book is one of these. On p. 131 he writes, ”I knew exactly where to hide the chest so it would be difficult to find but not impossible. It’s in the mountains somewhere north of Santa Fe.”  Note the difference between that sentence and, “…a treasure chest he says he buried somewhere in the mountains north of Santa Fe.”

And therein lies the trap. All news articles I have seen on the subject of his treasure chest interpret their own rephrasing of his statement to mean, “… in the mountains of Northern New Mexico.” But that is not what Forrest Fenn said. His statement could mean that he has hidden his treasure chest in any of the mountains from Santa Fe north to, and through, Alaska. Likewise, he never says that he “buried” the treasure but only that he “hid” it.  The Nation’s press from The Santa Fe New Mexican to The Huffington Post have conspired to lead us astray and I am convinced a chuckle can be heard every time Forrest Fenn reads such things.

However, despite this discovery after a “detailed analysis” of his profile, I am  not sure if this bit of information helps a whole lot. Before, we had to look in what amounted to two National Forests, a couple of areas managed by the National Park Service and several square miles belonging to the Bureau of Land Management. Now we have over a hundred National Parks and Forests covering several million acres that we have to think about.

I figured this out just as I was closing in on a promising spot along the road between Canjelon and El Rito. And now I have to go to Alaska?  Not bad, I say. It is something I have always wanted to do. I even have a nephew who has been a fishing guide up there for years—so long in fact, he’s not even afraid of grizzly bears—a real Joe Meek.  Surely he knows where the home of Brown is.

r/

Just over a year ago an event was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico to celebrate the release of a new publication by Forrest Fenn (The Thrill of the Chase-A Memoir One Horse Land & Cattle Co. Santa Fe. 147 pp). The book is a collection of short stories that relate to Forrest Fenn’s time growing up in a small Texas town, his summers spent in and around Yellowstone National Park, his time as a pilot in Vietnam, and his years as a business owner in Santa Fe, where he still lives. Additional pieces include a touching ode to his wife and daughters, an essay on how and why he created and cast a series of bells that he has buried around New Mexico and a third piece, the one that will ensure that his book is the most studied of any book recently published, has to do with his hiding a treasure chest that holds over a million dollars in gold and jewelry and his promise that anyone who finds it can claim ownership.

The book contains a poem with nine clues that tell how the treasure chest can be found; other “subtle” clues are scattered throughout the book.  A bit about his affair with a waterfall in Vietnam and another about drinking tea with a neighbor named Olga who wanted him to scatter her ashes over the Taos Mountains (he did) are other of the stories that have attracted the attention of the amateurs out looking for his treasure.

I am one of those amateurs. Mr. Fenn has only recently discovered this although my wife had earlier told his wife that I am not only looking for the treasure but that I have “found” its hiding place three times already but the treasure was never there. She also asked Mrs. Fenn to have Mr. Fenn declare the treasure “found” before I spend all of our retirement funds on equipment from REI and on overnight trips to nowhere. I must say that it has been a lot of fun so far.

Sleuthiness.  In my first posting to this blog, I suggested that you might want to follow my lead in finding and interpreting the clues of Forrest Fenn. Here, in the interest of full disclosure, I confess that the extent of my mystery-solving, puzzle-breaking training consists solely in a bit of undergraduate work with Agents “86” and “99” of Get Smart in the 1960s and unfinished half-hearted graduate work with Colombo in the mid 1990s. The first had a whole lot to do with serendipity and dumb-luck and the second with an eye for detail, meticulousness and dedication to discovering the meaning of even the most absurd of clues.  Both, by which I mean serendipity and dumb-luck, will be needed if my search for Forrest Fenn’s treasure is to be successful.  This, I believe, is what so worries my wife.

A lack of trust not-with-standing, I have forged ahead and composed several self-imposed guidelines designed to keep my enthusiasm in check as well as to ensure my utmost attention to detail.  There are twenty of them:

1. Find everything that is possible to know about Forrest Fenn. To the degree possible, read everything he has written or that has been written about him.
2. To find the “hidden” clues in The Thrill of the Chase, look for ambiguous or forced words or phrases or for unnecessary changes in detail. Find at least one “clue” in each chapter no matter how far-fetched or improbable. You can cull them later.
3. Develop an exegesis of each of the known and suspected clues. Find out what “exegesis” means.
4. Develop interpretations to all clues in as much detail as possible.
5. Be aware of the possibility of blind alleys; we are matching wits with Forrest Fenn.
6. Do not, however, discount anything that Mr. Fenn says is a “clue.”
7. Evaluate the authenticity of any evidence discovered.
8. Interpretations of any clue must support interpretations of other clues—responses cannot be mutually exclusive.
9. Question anything not understood.
10. Do not make hasty conclusions. Try to disprove any conclusion felt to be the correct one.
11. Search for rival reasonable interpretations of all clues.
12. Search out related information or images elsewhere in any of the writings he mentions.
13. Question anything that appears as just a coincidence.
14. Do not discount any “clues” no matter how absurd they may appear.
15. Check all key words in all clues against all definitions of those words.
16. Be aware that the sequence of clues given in the poem in Thrill of the Chase must be followed.
17. The best alternative will be the one that responds to all of the clues especially if interpretations to clues found elsewhere backup the alternative chosen.
18. If you get tired of these guidelines, forget about them.
19. Intuition is not an enemy.

Of course, this list may not work for you and you can invent your own. The 20^th guideline, however, must work for everybody:

20. Explore. Whether it is inside or out-of-doors, if your heart is not beating as it did the first time you kissed your first beau or beauette, you’re probably not going in a very important direction.

Best, r/

The purpose for writing this blog is to tell you how my search for the world’s most awesome geocache is going and give useful clues along the way that may help you get off your duff and start looking for it as well. The cache is a treasure chest containing over $1,000,000 in gold and jewelry hidden by fellow Santa Fean, Forrest Fenn (http://www.kob.com/article/stories/S2261145.shtm). I will explain more about that later.

Others are searching for the treasure as well and some of them also have blogs that tell about their failures to find the chest. But mostly their blogs are wonderful stories beautifully written about the discoveries they make while out looking for what they haven’t yet found (http://lummifilm.wordpress.com/).

Mine will be different. The way it is to work is that I will explain the clues Forrest Fenn has given us in his book, The Thrill of the Chase, as I understand them but with just enough of a time lag so that the final clue, the key, the closing argument will be known only to me until the treasure chest is safely locked away in my storage shed.

I will also be like Forrest Fenn and give just enough information to send you in the wrong direction even though the clue, if faithfully followed, will lead you in the right direction, down the correct valley, along a perfectly defined trail to the exact spot where Forrest Fenn could have carefully placed his treasure.

But you will have to do your part—especially if you want to get there before I do. First, to follow along or even jump ahead, you will need to buy the book The Thrill of the Chase, A Memoir by Forrest Fenn that is available only from the Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, New Mexico. http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/. Profits from the sales go to help pay for the treatment of children with cancer; how many children will depend upon you.

Second, you will have to “forge ahead” no matter how boring the post. I will try to keep each one at 750-900 words so you won’t get dizzy.  Come back often and there will be something new depending on the snow conditions at the Santa Fe Ski Basin; I have reached the age where skiing is a “freebie” so deadlines may not mean what they mean.

The book, The Thrill of the Chase itself, is “filled” with clues; probably more than Forrest Fenn intended and fewer than those I have ‘found.’  I have divided all these clues into three parts: 1) clues that will help us figure out just who Forrest Fenn is—a necessary task for a number of reasons. Of course, he will accuse us of making things up but pay no attention. He is much more open than he wants us to believe; 2) clues that will tell us whether or not it is true that he has hidden a fortune for anyone to find and possess—after the IRS has taken its share; and 3) clues that will lead us (me!) to the treasure. One of my favorite clues has already been repeated in this very post. See if you can find it. Of course you will also have to decipher it if you are to have any chance at all of finding the treasure.  Don’t Google “thrill of the chase” though.  I tried that and the first six results were porn sites; they definitely will not help you find Forrest Fenn’s cache.

The last thing you must do is to get in shape: learn where ‘North’ is, build up your legs and lungs and trim your toenails. We are about to follow Mr. Fenn on a fine, fine journey.

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