Did Forrest Fenn Draw a Circle Dot

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My old Toyota Corolla, with its blooming rust spot on the left fender and a collection of dents, trembles as I urge it up a zig-zaggy road into New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I'm feeling near guilty about pushing it then difficult. The Corolla doesn't know it yet, only our human relationship is ending—within a few hours, if everything goes according to plan. When I haul a treasure breast out of the wilderness, I'll call the nearest Subaru dealer and have them deliver me a shiny, new all-bicycle-drive, for which I'll manus over a fat gold coin.

On the seat next to me, under a road atlas and an empty coffee mug, lies the document that catalyzed our impending breakup: a 24-line verse form (far right) penned by an 83-twelvemonth-old New Mexican art dealer and archeologist named Forrest Fenn. Its hidden clues, he says, lead to a bronze chest filled with millions of dollars worth of golden nuggets, rare coins, gems, and jewelry. I'm not certain why I brought the verse form—good luck? a sense of security?— considering I've puzzled over its clues enough that I know the lines by center. I'm as well pretty sure I know where its cryptic code points. Nothing left to exercise now only collect my riches.

photograph: Addison Doty

WHERE THE TREASURE LIES
past Forrest Fenn
As I have gone alone in in that location And with my treasures assuming, I can keep my undercover where, And hint of riches new and erstwhile.
Begin information technology where warm waters halt And take it in the canyon down, Not far, merely too far to walk. Put in below the home of Brown.
From there information technology's no place for the meek, The stop is ever drawing virtually; There'll be no paddle upwards your creek, Just heavy loads and water loftier.
If you lot've been wise and found the blaze, Look quickly down, your quest to cease, Merely tarry scant with marvel gaze, Just take the breast and get in peace.
So why is information technology that I must go And leave my trove for all to seek? The answer I already know, I've done it tired, and at present I'm weak.
Then hear me all and mind good, Your attempt will be worth the cold. If you are brave and in the forest I give you title to the gilt.

I've heard people who win the lottery say they won't quit their jobs. Non me. I'll retire right away, then buy a handsome little boat and sail around the world. Never mind that I tin't sail. I can beget lessons. I can afford anything. Mayhap later on a bout around the earth I'll move to a motel in the wood and fly fish.
Winding downwardly the backside of the mountains, I catch a whiff of burning brakes. That'southward okay. We're about there. Besides, I have more practical concerns: About boats have names. What should I name mine?

My friends and family have come to expect strange declarations from me in my 15 years as a freelance writer: Off to the jungles of Southeast Asia, or to report in Afghanistan, or to climb a mountain in Nepal. But when I told them I was leaving to find a literal treasure, it was as though I'd said I want to be an astronaut when I grow up. I'm 39. But when I told my nine-yr-old nephew my plans, he looked at me with eyes large and oral cavity open, an expression that said, Adults go to practise things like that? Maybe growing up will be only similar beingness a kid, only awesome.

He's right. It is crawly, specially since I can use my adult brainpower and resource on the chore. There's a real, potentially life-irresolute prize out at that place, and a real person will find it. It'll take more work than playing the lottery, just earning the prize is role of the appeal for me—and, I suspect, for the hundreds of others who take tried to follow the clues since Fenn released them in 2010. Whoever finds the treasure, it'll be thanks to wits and skill—not mere luck. I'1000 good with wordplay and handy with a map and compass. Why shouldn't it be me?

Fenn says he hid his treasure somewhere in the Rockies, at to the lowest degree eight.5 miles n of Santa Fe, where he lives. Northern New United mexican states alone is 30,000 square miles. Daunting, to say the least. Luckily, I've watched Indiana Jones. I striking the books start: Fenn's 2010 memoir, The Thrill of the Hunt, a rambling business relationship of his childhood in Texas, summers spent every bit a fishing guide around Yellowstone, bombing missions in Vietnam, and his rise as a particularly skilled art dealer and amateur archaeologist.

The book has hints that help explain the ix clues hidden in the poem. Information technology was a cancer scare that spawned Fenn's plan to hibernate a treasure chest, so two stories stood out to me, both reflections on bloodshed and what re- mains afterward we're gone: In Vietnam, where Fenn was shot downwards twice, he visited a remote waterfall and near its base he institute a graveyard filled with the bodies of French soldiers. The residuum of the world had forgotten about them. Years later, after Fenn had moved to Santa Iron and opened an art gallery, a friend of his asked that he scatter her ashes over Taos Mountain. He flew his aeroplane over the peak, but he didn't think she'd want to balance forever in the cold of the snow-covered height, so he dropped her ashes somewhere shut by instead. In both stories, he mentions yellow and royal flowers in the area. Coincidence? No way. My girlfriend, who had been studying a map of New Mexico as I read aloud from the book, smiled and tapped her finger on an area due east of Taos.

"Agua Fria Peak," she said. I looked at her dumbly. "Cold water."

Ah ha! And that's non far from Taos Mountain. If Fenn had turned his plane due east, he could take poured the ashes effectually there. Begin it where warm waters halt. I dug deeper and learned that most Agua Fria Peak is a memorial dedicated to 16 Marines killed in Vietnam in 1968. One of them was Davis F. Dark-brown. Habitation of Brown.

In an afternoon's fourth dimension, I had whittled down my search expanse from a quarter-million square miles to just a few. I'd beginning at the memorial, head to a nearby river with a couple of waterfalls—there'll be no paddle upward your creek; simply heavy loads and water high—and somewhere betwixt them I'd find the treasure. I loaded up the car with snacks, camping ground gear, and Fenn's book, and was off to claim my prize.

Chewing a piece of hasty while Johnny Greenbacks sings of bad luck and hard times, I admire the mountains that stretch to the horizon. The view almost makes me pity the other treasure hunters, wasting their time in all the wrong places. They're going to be pretty bummed when they hear a start-timer scooped it up.

But as I descend into a broad valley, uncertainty creeps in. There's the memorial, assail a wide, grassy hillside. But at that place's not so much as a skinny creek nearby, and none of the fast-charging streams and waterfalls I'd expected.

I pull off the route a few times and accuse into the surrounding forests, too stubborn to accept that I might be wrong.

Finally I flop back into the car, snatch the poem from the passenger'due south seat, and scan the stanzas with disbelieving eyes. Chastened by the setback, I ponder my kickoff lesson in the elusiveness of Fenn's treasure: From a few hundred miles away, it was easy to jam square clues into round holes and experience pretty confident in my conclusions. So confident that I gave Google Earth little more than than a quick glance before hopping into my auto for the 10-hour drive from Phoenix. I chalk it upward to amateur'due south hubris.

Time for Plan B: experts.

Before I left for New United mexican states, I had clicked and scrolled through blogs, message boards, and Facebook pages where searchers trade theories. Some recount fun weekends with family; others declare the treasure has already been found, or that information technology'south a hoax. Many are cagey in their posts, non wanting to give too much abroad. And there are those who know exactly where it is, 100 percent, only don't have the money to finance their expedition, or tin can't get the time off work. "I broke Forrest code last year and know where he has buried his treasury [sic]. Really it isn't cached but I won't say more," 1 poster wrote. "If you want my maps, make me a bargain, a substantial deal."

But hour three of inquiry yielded a promising atomic number 82: Taos art gallery owner Doug Scott has been hiking and rafting some of the most remote areas of northern New Mexico since the early 1970s. For the past several years, his fascination has been waterfalls. He's photographed hundreds. Some are just 100 yards off-trail, only unknown to most everyone who passes by—only the sort of place Fenn might have visited with his treasure.

Just off the quondam plaza in Taos, I step into a gallery filled with early-morning sunlight, its walls lined with paintings of wildlife. I spot Scott in the back, near an easel. A thin gray beard runs along his jawbone and frames a face tanned and weathered by decades outdoors. Scott has just opened his gallery for the day and the tourists aren't drifting in yet, so he offers me a seat at the back. I'm far from the showtime treasure hunter who's come looking for his advice, he tells me. He's met most 50 so far, and he can usually spot them speedily, milling in the gallery but non paying attention to his art.

"The bulk of the people looking for the treasure who bother me almost it can inappreciably walk a mile," he says. "They tell me 'I know it's upwardly that coulee. Come out with u.s.. We'll separate information technology with you lot.'" He declines politely, tells them he has also much work, but doesn't tell them the rest: "They're basically lazy people," he says. "They desire to be a millionaire without working for it." Um, who doesn't?

Scott says he hasn't looked for the treasure himself. And while he tin recommend plenty of waterfalls for me to visit, he doesn't have whatsoever leads on where it might be. I wonder if he knows more than than he's letting on. Possibly the poem has kept him awake at night, too. Mayhap he has his own hole-and-corner map of likely spots, his own dog-eared copy of Fenn's book. Maybe his search for waterfalls is just a clever front. Maybe I'm getting paranoid.

He wishes me luck, so pops upwards from his seat to greet a couple eyeing a painting of charging horses. That'southward my cue to leave. I wander down the street, past cafes and more art galleries, plotting my side by side move. Scott can't exist the only local who might, even unknowingly, harbor inside knowledge.

On the border of town I spot the Taos Wing Shop, a weathered wooden edifice that looks similar an old Wild West trading postal service. Line-fishing has been a big office of Fenn's life, and many people translate dwelling house of Brown every bit brown trout, which would brand these guys the area experts. Inside, I detect Nick Streit and his married woman, Christina. Nick grew up fishing these rivers and at present runs the shop, which his dad opened in 1980. Past his blood-red cheeks, I can see Nick still spends plenty of time on the h2o. The guides are out with clients, and Christina is working a broom beyond the flooring. I ask about Fenn's treasure and they merchandise a glance. Nick gives me a here-we-go- over again nod.

They've been visited past a few vacationing couples, and four college buddies on a reunion trip, only Nick particularly remembers a immature woman who came asking nigh areas out near Agua Fria Peak, my first failed location. "She knew just where she should go," he says. She asked him questions for an 60 minutes. He brought out topo maps, and was generous with his time. She scribbled a rough sketch of the area on a piece of fleck paper. "I told her, 'You can buy one. Information technology's but $8.' She says, 'Oh, I tin can't afford that!'

"This daughter was going to a place outsiders shouldn't be going, and walking across people's belongings," Nick says. "They have guns." He gives me a raised countenance that says Y'all demand to know what you're getting into.

I hadn't actually considered bullet wounds as a potential event of this quest. Imagining a behind full of buckshot dampens some of the romantic allure. And then I stop imagining it, and forge ahead. "Where would you lot look?" I ask.

Nick and Christina suggest the rugged sections of the Rio Grande River, or the wilderness areas north of Taos.

"How do I know you're non trying to throw me off, be- cause you're looking for it, too?" I realize it'south hard to joke about the treasure without sounding half-serious.

"If we found it," Nick says, "we'd hang a sign on the front door: Gone fishing forever. Treasure found."

With a very squeamish $8 map from Nick and Christina's shop, I head northward of Taos and army camp in Carson National Wood, about an area that Nick suggested, with canyons and mountain streams that would make adept hiding spots. I'm up early and dayhiking deeper into the mountains, the poem stuck on repeat in my caput. I poke around some rocks well-nigh a cascading stream and peer into pools of water—Fenn says the chest is subconscious, not necessarily buried— simply I notice no treasure. As I look out on the miles of woods around me, it occurs to me just how trivial of the wilderness nosotros actually explore. As of today I tin can count these mountains as a identify I've hiked, just I've merely seen the view from this brown ring of trail snaking through the forest. Fenn could accept hidden his chest behind any one of those afar ponderosa pines.

I crest a hill, which opens to a vast meadow between ridges. A herd of 200 elk stand a few hundred feet ahead. They're frozen, having seen me before I noticed them. They bolt. I run into flashes of brown and hear the thunder of their hooves, hundreds of branches snapping, and mothers calling for their bleating calves. Farther along I laissez passer half dozen bighorn sheep and run into another three higher up, perched on a steep ledge, looking down at me. While no homo but Fenn has laid eyes on the treasure's hiding spot, I imagine some animals have. If only I could ask them.

I swallow lunch on the rounded, rocky hump of Gilt Hill, watching tempest clouds gather on the horizon, and make it back to treeline earlier the thunder rolls in. A few miles from the car, the valley floor narrows to nigh 60 feet broad, with rock walls on both sides. The poem plays through my head on its maddening loop as I scan the canyon for a lilliputian waterfall, or an easy-to-miss cave where Fenn might have tucked the treasure chest. My heart beats a little faster each time I go to cheque on a spot. I wish I'd brought my nephew; he'd capeesh turning a hike into a giant game of hide-and-seek.

But ahead, maybe 20 anxiety, a deer crashes through the brush and runs to the far side of the little box canyon. I can hear him moving toward the stone wall on the right side, where I'll exist able to go a good wait at him. He steps out from behind the trees, 30 feet from me.

Only he'due south not a deer. He'southward a rather big black carry.

What a light-headed manner to die this will be, killed by a bear while hunting for treasure. Although, what a fashion to die! Killed by a bear while hunting for treasure! I accept a few steps backward and wait. He stares at me, and so sniffs the air and turns to some berries on a nearby branch as I stride lightly past him and downward the trail.

I've hiked a 19-mile loop through stunning scenery, and had it all to myself. But back at the doomed Corolla, with my tired feet enjoying flip-bomb freedom, I realize that much of the trek was unnecessary: A 79-twelvemonth-erstwhile man carrying a heavy box probably wouldn't have lugged it miles from a road. Another rookie error. At this point, I'd have the same luck throwing darts at my new map.

I need to meet Fenn.

For those who torture themselves trying to decipher Forrest Fenn's poem, being invited to his firm is like finding the golden ticket and visiting Willy Wonka'southward Chocolate Manufactory. At least that's how I feel as I pull through the gate in a neighborhood of onetime Santa Fe homes hidden by high walls and drive upwardly to his pocket-size, stucco villa, escorted by a trio of yipping dogs.

Fenn has welcomed a few treasure hunters into his home, but I don't take a heartwarming story. And then I've played my other menu—reporter. I can give him a little publicity, and maybe cajole a clue from him forth the style.

Forrest Fenn at his dwelling house in Santa Atomic number 26, New Mexico. [photo : Jen Judge]

I knock on the door, and there he is, wispy white hair, crisp blue push-down shirt tucked into jeans, with a soft vocalization and Texas drawl predisposed to storytelling. Stories that start like this: "I was standing right here one 24-hour interval with Ralph Lauren…"

Fenn leads me into his den, which is similar a little museum, the walls and shelves crowded with moccasins, jewelry, tomahawks, and a model of the fighter he flew in Vietnam. This is simply the barest glimpse of the art and artifacts he has nerveless, traded, and sold over the decades to amass his wealth.

He writes his books hither, and answers emails from treasure seekers. He'south received more than 36,000 over the final 3 years. He'll oft respond if the notes are short, and kind, and the writer signs her name and doesn't enquire too many questions. Many people are looking for tips, or telling him where they've looked and wondering whether they're hot or common cold. He never lets on, but he tells me a few people have deciphered the first ii clues correctly, and a few accept been within 500 feet of the treasure.

Certainly the treasure is in office about legacy, and Fenn is having fun in his old age—creating a reason for people to talk nigh him before he goes, and, if the treasure re- mains unfound, to remember him long after he'southward gone. But he'southward more than small-scale in his reasoning; for the record, he says he hid the chest to inspire people to turn off their TVs and gadgets and enjoy nature. He'southward overjoyed by the emails about begetter-son searches, and the family unit-vacation treasure hunts, or the ii brothers who hadn't spoken for 17 years, until i read about the treasure. They went searching for it together and are all-time friends again.

On the flip side, someone sent him a expiry threat a few days before my visit. He'south called the police twice on people who stopped by uninvited and wouldn't get out, and one human followed him when he left the house, thinking he might be going to cheque on the treasure. Others can't believe that their search spot was wrong. "They've figured out exactly where the treasure chest is," Fenn says. "They go to that spot and information technology isn't there. So 1 of 2 things: Either Forrest Fenn is a fraud, or someone has already found it. They're admittedly convinced. Never mind that it's 400 miles some identify else."

"Does it give you some enjoyment knowing this drives people crazy?" I ask.

"Well, I'm kind of proud of that," Fenn says, "because what you're saying is I make people recall."

We sit on a soft leather burrow and our conversation meanders from Jimmy Carter's passion for arrowhead collecting to the intricacies of belongings law1, but he's evasive when the topic shifts to the treasure itself. He gently deflects my questions or tells me a new story, like angling a beautiful stretch of the Madison River near Yellowstone. He has wanted to return there, only it's besides far to walk—which is both a line from the poem and the name of his new drove of stories about his life. Plenty of people are searching that area, where Fenn spent and then many childhood summers, but he's not offering me a hint.

He's released a trickle of new clues since he first announced the treasure, which keeps him in the spotlight, of grade, just he also doesn't want the blame for hunters' missteps. He says the treasure is in a higher place 5,000 feet—and due north of Santa Fe—then hapless fools won't be dying in the desert, and that it's not associated with a structure or buried in a cemetery, to keep them from destroying property or desecrating graves. Merely those extra clues aren't much help, because Fenn knows some pretty obscure hiding spots.

He starting time explored the Southwest backcountry in the 1960s while stationed at an Air Force base in Arizona. Cruising over the canyons and deserts in a fighter jet, he'd spot a tucked-abroad ruin, and return later by Jeep or on pes. When he moved to Santa Fe in the early on 1970s, he fished the Pecos River and small streams, and hiked all over central and northern New Mexico, "to get the lay of the land," he says, "and learn something near the country in which I lived."

He seems confident that hunters are withal far from finding the breast, and I don't think he wants it institute anytime soon. He's enchanted with the idea that someone may be every bit interested in the treasure 500 years from now as he is in the objects that surround him in his den.

Fenn takes me to his "laboratory," a modest room just off the garage loaded with Spanish chain mail and religious medallions, whole pots and plates from the Pueblo eras, musket assurance, arrowheads, and rock tools. He encourages tactile relationships with artwork and artifacts, and tells me I can touch anything. Nigh of the antiquities I've seen in my life were sealed backside glass cases, so it'due south pretty damn cool—and a surprisingly powerful sensation—to rub a 500-year-former Castilian coin betwixt my fingers, or a piece of Ming Dynasty porcelain that made its way from China to New Mexico via the Philippines and Mexico Metropolis.

Fenn was nine years onetime when he found his commencement arrowhead, the same year he started a listing of rules to live past, which he has added to and reordered throughout his life. "I decided that my number-one rule is this: It doesn't thing who yous are, it just matters who they call up you are," he tells me. "It'south what I can make you believe."
Oh boy. For a quick moment I feel like I've been had, suckered into an elaborate illusion.

Simply I remember fifty-fifty a trickster similar Fenn would find it unseemly and lacking honor to only lie about the treasure. And he doesn't appear to lack for money. Rather, his rule seems to reverberate his impatience with title and privilege and societal norms. Anyone can be a successful art dealer or archeologist without fancy degrees. But like anyone can hide a box of treasure—and carve out a little place for themselves in history. Merely similar anyone can detect it.

He says he e'er knew the hiding spot, merely spent 15 years massaging the clues to match before he hid the chest. With the cancer treated, he had time to get the words just right. "People think I saturday down one night and wrote that poem. I didn't write that poem, I crafted information technology," he says. "No one is going to observe that treasure chest on a Sun afternoon picnic or over spring intermission."

Even Peggy, his married woman of lx years, doesn't know where it is. For several years earlier he hid the box, it sat on a table in his vault—where he keeps many of his pricier possessions—covered with a red bandana. One day she pulled away the bandana and found a stack of Fenn'southward books in place of the chest. He told her just that he'd hidden it one-time in the previous eighteen months.

Will he ever laissez passer on the location? Maybe a deathbed disclosure?

"No," Fenn says. "Never, never, never, never, never. People may all the same be looking for it for 10,000 years from at present."

My time with Fenn, enjoyable every bit it was, hasn't brought any clarity to my search. But I'm non prepare to resign myself to the dartboard strategy. Northern New Mexico nevertheless feels like the right place, speckled with deep canyons, waterfalls, and remnants of past civilizations. Fenn has fifty-fifty hinted in interviews that he might similar to go to the hiding spot to die and have his bones rest nigh the treasure, which suggests a location close to home.

I head northwest of Santa Fe to Los Alamos, where I've bundled a coffee-store rendezvous with Craig Martin, author of 100 Hikes of New Mexico. The 61-year-quondam has a gray ponytail brushing his shoulders, and he hikes about 1,800 miles a yr. As the open-space specialist for Los Alamos County, he maintains and promotes the county's trails, essentially doing the same things as Fenn: Trying to get people exterior.

Martin has read Fenn's poem, and he humors my request for skillful assay. He dons a pair of reading glasses and ponders the stanzas. He sips his coffee and removes his spectacles. Just no epiphany; instead, he quotes Henry David Thoreau: I frequently tramped 8 or 10 miles through the deepest snowfall to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellowish birch, or an old acquaintance amongst the pines.

"He knew what it was all virtually," Martin says. "You honey a little tree and you go and visit it. Out hither it's rock formations, petroglyphs, or a little stand up of wildflowers that merely grow in one place. Last week I found a new species of plant that hadn't been documented in Los Alamos County."
Maybe he can see the disappointment on my face, the golden gleam draining from my eyes. He throws me a crumb.

"Forth the Rio Chama. That'southward where I'd expect."

An hour north of Los Alamos, I turn down a rattly, clay Forest Service road that skirts the trout-filled Chama River for xiii miles. I retrieve I'grand finally onto something. Afterward meeting Martin, I studied maps of the expanse and found divine inspiration: This road ends at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, built in 1964 at the base of a loftier red sandstone wall. The monastery is home to a couple dozen monks. Monks wear brown robes. Habitation of Chocolate-brown. And upstream, the river pools in a reservoir behind the El Vado Dam, where warm waters halt.

I park just below the monastery and start up a dry out streambed into Chavez Canyon, ready for more clues to click like the tumblers on a vault'south lock, or at to the lowest degree for the feeling that they might. It's kind of addictive, and I'g starting to understand why and so many people spend their weekends geocaching. Whatever the prize, at that place's something nearly the search itself that makes any hike more exciting. Like something special might happen effectually any turn. I guess that's probably how Fenn felt looking for relics. It's like doing a puzzle while taking a hike. It's fun.

I climb up through the first of several sculpted sandstone slots. Halfway through the 2nd, stemming my hands and anxiety confronting the slick-with-grit walls, I pause to consider the sense of this. If I fall, out here alone, I'll exist in trouble. Luckily, this is in keeping with the verse form: From there it'due south no identify for the meek, the end is ever drawing nigh.

This is exactly the sort of identify I'd imagined when I'd read Fenn's verse form for the offset time, though I figured I'd be using a rope to swing across a pounding stream, or peradventure easing my style along a brittle bridge, with a swirling whirlpool and certain death only beneath.

The few footprints I saw early the trail have stopped. Now information technology's simply the occasional deer rails until, while crossing through a patch of soft mud in the streambed, I see a fresh cougar print as large as my fist. I make a quick and pointless glance over my shoulder—if the cougar wanted to bother me, he'd already be latched on my cervix.

At the 3rd slot, an viii-foot ledge leads upwardly to a large cavern. I prop a co-operative against the rock face and climb it like a ladder until I tin can pull myself over the lip. But the cavern is empty, and before me is an even higher wall, xx feet tall.

Crap.

This canyon is likewise rugged for an old man with a heavy box. But I can picture a younger Fenn in just this sort of place, searching out an aboriginal ruin that hadn't been seen in 1,000 years, brushing dirt from an artifact and turning over the past in his hand.

Support at the monastery, I want to ask the monks what they think of such earthly treasures as Fenn's box of gold and gems—or, a long shot, if they accept any inspired thoughts well-nigh its location—but realize I need simply await around me for the answer. They alive simple lives of material deprivation. If they saw value in earthly riches, they wouldn't be out here.

"What do you practise here all day?" I ask 1 of the monks.

"Nosotros pray!" he says, sounding rather jubilant. Seven times a day. In between, they work in the fields forth the river, growing hops, and they mash beer, which is sold throughout New United mexican states. I also larn they're Benedictine monks, who wear black robes, not dark-brown. Oops.

I wander into a edifice next to the chapel. On a tabular array nigh a pocket-sized room filled with photographs of the New United mexican states desert, I find an essay the monk Thomas Merton wrote about the monastery and the power of wilderness. "There is zero terminal or permanent nigh the desert. All that really matters is ahead of 1," he writes.

After reading his essay, I sit on a covered porch, on a long wooden bench, and picket clouds push button across the clifftops on the far side of the Chama. Mist hangs over the fields of hops. The monastery grounds are purposefully quiet, with little chat. From far over in the monk'due south surface area, a bellowing, blithesome laugh breaks the stillness.
All all of a sudden, I care much less most Fenn'southward treasure. Having shared the trail with a cougar will be my reward for the mean solar day.

I watch a monk stroll past the rows of hops, then I walk back to my dinged and dented car, which waits for me forth the road, however loyal. I'thou ready to go home and savor a monk-brewed beer. And even so, as I drive back down the dirt road, my eyes are drawn to the side canyons and mesa tops and the far-off peaks along the horizon. I already know I'll never be in the Rockies again without a few lines of the verse form sneaking into my head. Fenn's treasure is out here, somewhere, maybe 1,000 miles away, or maybe up the next canyon, just around the bend in the river.

Of course, the river! I've been going about it all wrong! What I need is a raft. I'll float down the Rio Chama, hop out along the way, and investigate all these hiding spots. I'll notice my box of riches even so.

I wonder if "Hey Forrest, I establish it!" will fit on the back of a sailboat.

Brian Mockenhaupt is even so driving his Toyota Corolla.

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Source: https://www.backpacker.com/stories/x-marks-the-spot/

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