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Warning: This post contains spoilers for Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure.
To the uninitiated, the idea of a modern-day treasure hunt may seem like something of a fool’s errand. But as a new Netflix docuseries makes abundantly clear, there’s a thriving community of contemporary treasure seekers who view it as quite the opposite.
Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure, all three episodes of which are now streaming, chronicles the true story behind the decade-long search for a treasure chest filled with over $1 million worth of gold, jewels, and other valuables hidden somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. The hunt was set in motion in 2010 by then-80-year-old Forrest Fenn, an eccentric millionaire art dealer who stashed the chest in the wilderness before publishing a memoir containing a cryptic 24-line poem that provided clues about the treasure’s location.
Gold & Greed, which was directed by Jared McGilliard and filmed in the aftermath of the 2020 discovery of the treasure, centers on a few of the die-hard fortune chasers who were motivated enough by Fenn’s challenge to spend years of their lives looking for his hidden box of riches, including retiree Cynthia Meachum, computer scientist Justin Posey, and the father-son team of the Hurst family. While Fenn’s treasure hunt inspired a sense of adventure in many searchers, the documentary also explores the dark side of the quest, which resulted in five deaths, a harrowing stalking case, and a good deal of crushing disappointment.
The search begins
The idea for the hunt came to Fenn after he was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1988. Believing his prognosis was terminal, Fenn originally planned to write the puzzle poem, hide the treasure, and eventually hike back out to that same location and take his own life, hoping someone would one day discover the riches that remained at his final resting spot. After he…
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