The location of a hidden treasure worth £2million has finally been revealed after five men died in the hunt to find it.
The man behind the global search, art dealer Forrest Fenn, died in 2020 following a fall at his home in New Mexico, aged 90.
He allegedly hid a chest full of pre-Columbian artifacts, gold and ancient Chinese jade carvings worth millions of pounds somewhere in the Rockies in 2010.
Then, in his self-published autobiography The Thrill of the Chase, he included a 24-line poem that detailed a series of cryptic clues as to the location of buried treasure.
Five hunters have lost their lives in their quest for wealth and glory.
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In 2016, Randy Bilyeu, 54, disappeared. Seven months later, his skeletal remains were discovered along the Rio Grande in New Mexico.
Then, in the summer of 2017, three more men died.
Jeff Murphy died in Yellowstone National Park; Eric Ashby died in a raft on the Arkansas River and the remains of 52-year-old Colorado pastor Paris Wallace were found floating in the Rio Grande.
Months before the trunk was discovered, Michael Sexson, 53, never returned from the Utah/Colorado border after he and a companion got stuck in snow with little to no water and only a few bars of chocolate to help them cope with cold temperatures, rescuers said.
Her companion, a 63-year-old man, survived.
Although Fenn called the deaths “tragic”, he never called off the hunt.
He once told the New York Times, “If someone is drowning in the pool, we shouldn’t drain the pool. We should teach people to swim.
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It took 10 years before the bounty was discovered, and more than 350,000 people fought in their hopes of becoming victorious…and extremely wealthy.
The Finder, who turned out to be medical student and former journalist Jack Stuef, said it took him 25 days to locate the treasure in a specific area.
He claimed to have solved the riddle in 2018, but it took him another two years to locate the actual chest.
He said: “This treasure hunt was the most frustrating experience of my life. There were a few times where, exhausted, covered in scratches, bites, sweat and pine pitch, and approaching At the end of my watering day, I sat on a downed tree and just cried alone in the woods in pure frustration.
But, despite the disbelief of thousands of other treasure hunters that Stuef really found the treasure, Fenn himself confirmed it to be true in 2020.
He made the announcement on his blog, hiding the Finder’s identity but saying he had been sent photographic evidence to confirm the find.
If he had already waited ten years, why suddenly choose to end the hunt if not because someone had really found the chest?
We’ll never know what really inspired Fenn to cause global pandemonium, as the eccentric art dealer and former fighter pilot died at home in 2020.
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But, in what can only be considered a parting puzzle, Fenn had recently revealed the location of the chest in another enigmatic and mystifying way.
He said: “He was under a canopy of stars in the lush, wooded vegetation of the Rocky Mountains and hadn’t moved from where I hid him over 10 years ago.”
Indeed, one could say that he did not reveal his location at all.
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