“The chase is over,” Fenn tells reporters, “And I’m both happy and sad about that.”
I guess we can call this good news, at least for the person who located Fenn’s storied $2 million treasure recently in the Rockies, which Fenn confirmed through a photo sent to him. Fenn, who lives in Santa Fe, buried the chest over a decade ago, saying he did so to get people into the wilderness.
Fenn has been an art and antiquities collector for his entire life and worked on the chest for years, packing it with pre-Columbian animal figures, rare gold coins, gold nuggets, prehistoric hammered gold, antique jewelry with emeralds and rubies, and ancient Chinese faces. He even dusted it from time to time with gold dust!
He posted clues online to the treasure’s location and wrote a 24-line poem that was published in his 2010 autobiography “The Thrill of the Chase.” As of today, he still hadn’t revealed the location, but confirmed that the chest sent to him by the lucky person who found it is authentic and definitely the one he buried. One site claims that it was found in New Mexico.
“It was under a canopy of stars in the lush, forested vegetation of the Rocky Mountains and had not moved from the spot where I hid it more than 10 years ago,” Fenn said on his website Sunday.