Hunting for Forrest Fenn’s treasure chest with Daniel Barbarisi

In 2010, an eccentric fighter pilot-turned-art dealer, Forrest Fenn, hid a treasure chest full of jewels, gold coins and rare antiques somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Over the next decade, Fenn would instead preside over a decade-long gold rush that saw many thousands of treasure hunters scrambling across the Rocky Mountains in pursuit of his fortune.

Daniel Barbarisi first learned of Fenn’s hunt in 2017, when a friend became consumed with decoding the poem and convinced Barbarisi, a reporter, to document his search. What began as an attempt to capture the inner workings of Fenn’s hunt quickly turned into a personal quest that led Barbarisi down a reckless and potentially dangerous path, one that found him embroiled in searcher conspiracies and matching wits with Fenn himself. Over the course of four chaotic years, several searchers would die, endless controversies would erupt, and one hunter would finally find the chest – and let Barbarisi into his world, allowing him to verify the find and be one of the only people to ever see its contents as a whole.

Barbarisi will discuss his role in the hunt, the history of treasure hunting in America, and what drove the Fenn hunters to their level of sometimes fatal obsession.


Over 25 years in journalism Barbarisi has covered crime, politics, news, and ultimately sports, with stops at the Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Wall Street Journal, and now The Athletic, the sports wing of the New York Times, where he is currently a deputy managing editor. He joined the staff of the Wall Street Journal in 2010, where he spent five years as the beat writer covering the New York Yankees, left the WSJ at the end of 2015 to pursue his first book project, Dueling with Kings, and joined The Athletic in 2018. His latest book, Chasing the Thrill, was released in hardcover in 2021 and paperback in 2022. The native of Rye Brook, NY holds a bachelor's degree in history and political science from Tufts University, and a Master of Public Affairs degree from Brown University. He and his wife, Amalie Benjamin, live outside Boston.