Packing a thick jacket and warm hat to ward off the December chill, Kristie Cowling hiked among thick pines and rocky outcroppings above 7,000 feet in California’s Sierra Nevada – increasingly hopeful that she was nearing a hidden treasure.
The Las Vegas-area teacher, trying to beat forecasted snow, had driven more than 400 miles to an area near Lake Tahoe, where she believed cryptic clues had led her. She stuffed a backpack with water, beef jerky and a pocket knife before setting out on forested trails.
Cowling passed several other hikers, wondering if they were after the same thing: A treasure worth more than $2 million hidden by California crypto-millionaire Jon Collins-Black in five puzzle boxes in five secret locations across the country.
Gold bars from a shipwreck. A 120-carat sapphire. A Bitcoin. Historic artifacts. A rare pendant by Picasso.
“We’re pretty confident right now,” said Cowling, 48.
Since November, legions of amateur treasure hunters like Cowling have been racing to decipher clues in Collins-Black’s recently released book, “There’s Treasure Inside,” whose pages, including puzzles and maps, contain clues to finding the hidden fortune. The public hunt, which kicked off in November, has swelled online discussion groups and sent aspiring millionaires searching from Vermont to California.
It marks one of the most valuable “armchair” hunts that have proliferated since Forrest Fenn, a New Mexico art dealer, hid a million-dollar treasure in 2010 and left clues in a poem. Fenn’s hunt drew thousands of searchers and at times led to obsessive quests, arrests and several deaths.
Since Fenn’s treasure was found in 2020, a subculture of amateur treasure hunters – driven by adventure, community and a shot at riches – has flocked to a growing number of similar but often smaller hunts, poring over clues in books that typically accompany them and going “boots on the ground” to explore possible sites hiding a cache of valuables.
“It’s really crazy how it’s blown up, and it’s starting to become more mainstream,” said Mike Cowling, a 54-year-old Nevada IT worker who met Kristie during Fenn’s hunt. Now married, they run a popular YouTube channel to discuss theories and clues.
After missing out on Fenn’s valuables, later auctioned for $1.3 million, the pair are among those determined to solve the newest hunt first – whether it takes weeks, months or years – all while keeping the thrill from morphing into a risky obsession.
That’s not always easy, some searchers say, when it often seems like it’s just a single clue or one more expensive trip away.
After a day of searching earlier this month, Kristie Cowling made notes of landmarks that seemed to match clues in Collins-Black’s book. She believed she was on the right track.
“A thousand searchers have said this … ‘This is it, it can’t be anywhere else,’” she said. “This is the first time I’ve said it.”
Before creating his own treasure hunt, Collins-Black, 51, was a searcher.
It began around 2015, he told USA TODAY in an interview. After earning a windfall from crypto currency investments and other business ventures, he was looking for what to do next with his life.
Initially interested in pursuing treasure from underwater shipwrecks, but daunted by the required costs and technical expertise, Collins-Black stumbled on the hunt Fenn created.
Fenn, a former Vietnam War pilot who became wealthy dealing in art and antiquities, decided to hide a cache of 19th-century coins, gold, jewels, antiquities and an autobiography printed in tiny lettering, all sealed in an olive jar. The idea began when he was diagnosed with cancer, he said, but continued when he didn’t succumb to it.
Clues to the treasure’s location were contained in a 24-line poem that Fenn included in a book called “The Thrill of the Chase.” It included the lines, “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.”
Fenn’s hunt began around 2010. As word got out of its estimated value of more than $1 million, it drew increasing attention and sparked a mini gold rush. By 2013, he told the Associated Press, he had gotten 13,000 emails from treasure hunters, as well as 18 marriage proposals.
It wasn’t the first of its kind. In 1979, British author Kit Williams published Masquerade, a children’s book of riddles that provided clues to a golden rabbit. It was discovered three years later, but reportedly found with the help of insider information.
In 1982, Byron Preiss’ “The Secret” provided clues for 12 treasure boxes in cryptic verses with passages such as, “Thucydides is/North of Xenophon/Take five steps/In the area of his direction.” Preiss died in 2005, and so far only three boxes have been found, according to the Boston Globe. Others, including one whose prize was a golden owl, followed.
But Fenn’s hunt gained widespread appeal in part because its $1 million to $2 million estimated prize made searching worthwhile, and also because the poem made it seem simple and solvable for everyday people, said Jenny Kile, who runs a website that tracks such treasure hunts.
Over time, thousands poured into the hunt hoping for a life-changing fortune, scouring suspected spots in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. For many, it brought community and purposeful adventure in places like Yellowstone. For some, it became an addiction.
“Amateur treasure hunting has emerged as a unique American subculture represented prototypically by the Fenn chase community,” psychology professor Alan King wrote in a study published in 2021. He found that most saw the intellectual or emotional rewards of the chase as outweighing the “likely unattainable goal, with its associated risks.”
Fewer than 10%, King wrote, “described their abiding commitment to the chase as possibly an addiction.”
Collins-Black also went “down that rabbit hole,” he said. He read Fenn’s memoir and poem, studied treasure-hunter blogs, pored over maps, tried to dissect Fenn’s every utterance and spent 2016 searching full-time.
“It was always around the next corner in my mind. I was completely convinced that I would be the one to discover it,” he said.
His hopes were finally dashed in 2020, when Jack Stuef, a medical student, found the treasure hidden by then 89-year-old Fenn. Stuef later told Outside Magazine that he was “a little embarrassed by how obsessed I was with it.”
Fenn died soon after. Fenn’s hunt had generated lawsuits by searchers claiming the treasure belonged to them, according to Outside Magazine. But the community of searchers who loved the chase wanted more.
“Once the Forrest Fenn treasure was found, searchers missed the chase. And so because of that, a lot of searchers created their own hunts,” Kile said, noting that the last few years alone have produced about 20 active “armchair treasure hunts that she tracks on her website.
After the pandemic hit in 2020, Collins-Black, who lives near Los Angeles, decided he had the time and financial wherewithal to create a hunt of his own – one “just as magnificent and as large scale as I could make it, to try to really capture that spirit of adventure.”
But first, he needed a treasure.
For a Dungeons & Dragons fan who grew up the son of a minister in North Carolina, Collins-Black wanted his treasure to look like a hoard that a dragon might be guarding.
But as he talked to collections experts and looked at major auction house offerings, he decided to widen its appeal with different items that he spent more than a year acquiring, often at auctions.
That included gold bars salvaged from a ship and an emerald from Sri Lanka. A Bitcoin, which recently topped a value of $100,000. A jelly glass owned by George Washington, a gold pendant designed by Pablo Picasso and a diamond brooch owned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. There’s even a Michael Jordan rookie card and rare Pokémon cards.
Together, he said they’re worth millions – with some objects likely to rise in value over time.
He hired a blacksmith to create puzzle boxes. Directions come “with the box” so they don’t need to be forced open, he wrote in his book. They each have a different name, such as the Pokémon Box and the Appalachian Footpath Box. The Forrest Fenn Box is so named in part because it holds Fenn’s olive jar that Collins-Black purchased from the earlier Fenn hunt. One of the five contains the lion’s share of the treasure.
The clues that people need to find them, including puzzles, maps, a poem and stories, are all in the book, he said. Perhaps referring to the joy that Collins-Black says he hopes the hunt brings, there’s a short poem written on the back of the flap cover of a copy of the book provided to USA TODAY that reads, “Be solid, have grit; sparkle even as you pine. Here lies a joy divined.”
In deciding where and how to hide them, Collins-Black spent a lot of time studying maps and going on foot to hide the boxes.
The chase had to be difficult, he said, but not too difficult.
“If the treasure hunt goes 5 to 10 years, I don’t have a problem with that,” he said. “But I don’t want the treasure hunt to last 50 years.”
Since its release in November, Kristie and Mike Cowling, who also manage one of a number of Discord channels on treasure hunting, said it quickly gained traction with both veteran hunters and new enthusiasts.
Even Stuef, who found Fenn’s treasure in 2020, wrote on Medium in November that he was intrigued by the new hunt. “I can’t promise I won’t come out of treasure-hunting retirement to go looking for some of his riches,” he said.
Savino “Sam” Falco, a 60-year-old Chicago-area retiree, said he saw the dark side of treasure hunts during more than a dozen trips to various locations in hunting for the Fenn treasure.
“I’ve seen people put their lives at risk. I know one guy personally who lost half his toes because he went out in the winter unprepared,” he said. “I know another guy who spent most of his life savings.”
In 2016, the body of Randy Bilyeu, 54, was found months after he disappeared while looking for the treasure along the Rio Grande. A year later, a body was found in New Mexico that appeared to be a Colorado pastor who went missing while searching for the treasure.
in 2019, Montana’s Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office said two people were rescued near death searching near Yellowstone, an area with spotty cell service, fast-changing weather, dangerous rivers and bears. The New Mexico State Police Chief at one point asked Fenn to end the hunt.
Kristie Cowling also said the Fenn hunt led to risky outdoor searches and people who couldn’t stop after sinking so much time and money into it. “It was scary at times,” she said. “They become obsessed. The problem is, if you don’t have a job and you’ve been down and out, this is their way out.”
One relentless chaser was Darrell Seyler, a former police officer from the Seattle area who spent eight years searching. His quest was documented in the podcast Missed Fortune by Peter Frick-Wright. In Newsweek, Frick-Wright wrote that Seyler was banned from Yellowstone after he was swept down a river and had to be rescued. He soon returned and had to be rescued again, leading to his arrest.
He subsequently lost his job and his home. Later his pickup was stolen as he went back to continue his search.
“Fixation on a treasure hunt, coupled with the certainty of obtaining the prize, seems to float somewhere between narcissism, insecurity, the love of a challenge, and the sunk-cost fallacy (‘I’ve sunk so much into this, it’s gotta pay off!’),” Katherine Ramsland, a professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University, wrote about such hunts in Psychology Today.
Collins-Black says that while he can’t control what people do, he designed his hunt in hopes of avoiding all that.
None of his treasure boxes are hidden on private property, buried underground or in dangerous places to reach like a cliff, he said. They don’t require crossing a raging river. No special equipment is needed. Each is hidden within three miles of a public road. And he devoted a prologue to safety as people search.
“I’m really trying to drill into people’s minds that you don’t have to do anything dangerous,” Collins-Black said, who also hasn’t shared information with his family so they won’t be sought out.
Falco, a former auto company employee and high school soccer coach who in particular is eyeing a Picasso necklace, said he is working with a partner who lives in Arizona. But he said he enjoys it for the intellectual challenge and camaraderie. He makes sure to limit his quest’s claim on his time. He refuses to fixate over the fortune.
“I’ve never lacked the ability to say, ‘stop,’” he said, noting he’s not put off by long odds on a new search for which he’s already gone hunting on three trips. “I know the probability is low. But if you put the work in, you could find it.”
Coy Lothrop, 50, knows that’s possible.
In 2017, Lothrop, who teaches at Kilgore College in Texas learned about a treasure hunt connected with a book by author Pete Bissonette, “Breakfast Tea & Bourbon,” which promised a $50,000 prize.
He decided it could be a fun family outing. After one failed attempt, he further plumbed the book for clues and returned to an area near Hot Springs, Arkansas. This time, he found a spot and took a compass reading that seemed like a clue.
“I walked down about 60 feet….I walked behind that boulder, and there it was,” he said, finding a proxy item – a Balinese flute wrapped in plastic.
He and his wife celebrated quickly and scurried back to the hotel. “We’ve got to get off this mountain. If someone sees this, they could just take it from us,” he recalled, adding that he used part of the money to pay off family medical debt.
Now he’s hoping for a repeat – and has already been out scouting in Arkansas for the newest hunt, taking elevations, mileages, and measurements. He shares only some of what he believes could be clues. For example, he believes the torn-edged image of a Faberge Frog in the book potentially hints at the boundary lines of Newton County, Arkansas. From there, he looked for forest areas, then zeroed in on a trail called Hemmed-in Hollow, citing a reference in the book to a path becoming increasingly hemmed in.
But he also noticed signs competitors may have been there before him, such a brush removed from around a tree. He’s planning to keep looking for clues and return.
That’s part of what draws people to online discussions, where searchers dissect Collins-Black’s history and thinking while sharing insights and theories. Some also monitor chats to make sure no one is as close as they think they might be. Still more wonder if those sharing information are merely trying to misdirect others.
A spokeswoman for Collins-Black, who created incentives to entice finders into letting him know a treasure has been found, says so far there are no credible claims that any of the boxes have been located. But he acknowledged in interviews that people could decline to share their find.
Back in California last month, Kristie Cowling had spent the day searching in the mountains for the Past and Future Box, which includes private keys to a Bitcoin and whose chapter in the book includes a reference to the novel Ready Player One, a word search and a cryptogram.
How, she wondered, was the steel and brass box hidden if it wasn’t buried? “Is it in a tree? Is it in a tree stump? Then, is it under a rock? Is there any ground that has been disturbed?” she said.
Armed with photos of landmarks and landscapes, she went back to her motel and consulted with her husband. The next day, she did a methodical search but found nothing. She left, having to get back to her teaching job.
But as December progressed, she said she and her husband had found new hidden puzzles. She was certain she was on the right track.
She just needed more clues.
Chris Kenning is a national correspondent. Reach him at ckenning@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Crypto millionaire’s $2M fortune sparks hunt for hidden treasure
