The Forrest Fenn treasure hunt is back on, and if you want to find the loot, you’re going to have to binge-watch Netflix.
That’s the big takeaway from Netflix’s three-part docuseries Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure, which went live on Thursday, March 27. The series chronicles the decade-long hunt to find the chest that Fenn buried in the western United States—and the lives of the people who became swept up in the frenzy to find it. Over the three 50-minute episodes, the series dives into the good, the bad, and the ugly moments of the Fenn hunt, including the five deaths that occurred during it.
(Spoilers ahead) But the series’ headline-grabbing moment comes in Gold & Greed’s final few minutes. One of the treasure hunters profiled in the series, a software engineer named Justin Posey, reveals that he purchased some of the 476 items from the Fenn treasure after it went up for auction in 2022. And now, he’s put the goodies—along with additional gold, rubies, and even a meteorite—in a chest and buried it somewhere out there. To find the trove, you must decipher clues that are hidden in the three-part series.
“I managed to sneak in some hints during the filming of this series—no one knows what the hints are besides me, not even the producers,” Posey says in the series’ final scene. “So it’s worth your time to watch and listen closely.”
To be honest, the revelation helps explain some of Posey’s curious quirks throughout the docuseries. He drives a truck that’s wrapped in a topographic map, he sits for interviews in front of computer screens showing mountains, creeks, and lakes, and he lives in a house filled with strange artifacts from his own collection.
“Most of my family and friends would categorize me as eccentric,” Posey says in episode one.
So yeah, anyone who wants to find Fenn’s—er Posey’s—treasure is going to have to watch Gold & Greed again and again, until they have committed the entire program to memory.
I suppose that’s one way to market a documentary film.
Is Gold & Greed Worth Watching?
You bet. Aside from serving as a launchpad for Posey’s new treasure hunt, Gold & Greed does an adequate job of capturing the fervor (or, dare I say, psychosis) that prompted thousands of people to tromp into the wilderness searching for Fenn’s riches. Outside covered the Fenn treasure hunt between 2015 and 2023 with a series of longform features, news stories, analytical stories, and podcast episodes. But for anyone who isn’t familiar with the ordeal, Gold & Greed serves as an ideal explainer.
The opening episode devotes substantial time to profiling Fenn, the retired pilot and art dealer from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and to understanding why he launched the hunt back in 2010.
Fenn, who died in 2020 at age 90, famously kicked off the hunt with a poem he included in his memoir, titled Thrill of the Chase. The poem included extremely vague clues (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) about the location of the treasure, and these confusing directions were open to extreme interpretation.
Gold & Greed strongest contribution to the trove of Forrest Fenn coverage is showing how people become convinced that their interpretation of the poem is the right one.
One group, a family of self-proclaimed Wyoming rednecks named the Hurst family, believes that clues describe topography in the backwoods near their trailer. Over the course of a decade, the Hursts embark on one Sisyphean mission after another, and at one point spend two years attempting to excavate a massive boulder because they think the treasure chest is underneath it.
Another hunter, a California airline pilot named Lou Boyer, goes on one extreme Internet deep-dive after another until he’s convinced that the treasure is buried on a swath of private property along the Colorado-New Mexico border. Boyer takes his family on various vacations to the area, but is repeatedly thwarted by closed gates, flat tires, and other calamities.
Cynthia Meachum, a retiree, believes the key to finding the treasure is building a personal relationship with Fenn himself, and over the years she soaks up clues from Fenn that convince her it’s buried in Yellowstone National Park.
And then there’s Posey, who approaches the hunt with an analytical fanaticism that is equally impressive and concerning. He builds his own facial recognition software to analyze Fenn’s television interviews, hoping to decipher clues from the 85-year-old man’s mannerisms. He also trains his dog to sniff out buried gold and bronze.
Like Meachum, Posey becomes convinced that the treasure is somewhere in Yellowstone, and during one trip he searches the exact area where the box was eventually discovered in 2020 by a medical student named Jack Steuf.
As I watched Gold & Greed, I often thought about my teenaged fascination with playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz and watching the music create a perfect soundtrack for the film. It took me years to realize that this dynamic was simply caused by my brain instinctively making connections between the film and the album. Well, that and the pot smoke.
This psychological quirk, likely the remnant of some evolutionary trait, adds fuel to the hunters searching for Fenn’s treasure. They see patterns everywhere, and don’t require a bong rip to drop what they’re doing and hike off into the woods. But there are also very human dynamics propelling them. Posey’s brother, who also hunts the treasure, dies by suicide, and the tragedy convinces Posey that he must locate it. The Hurst family seeks the gold as a way to escape poverty and provide a better life for their disabled sister.
And all of the groups admit that the spirit of outdoor adventure is also driving them to walk into the backcountry searching for gold. Despite the rather unseemly elements of the Fenn hunt—more than a few weirdos stalked Fenn and his family, and one even broke into his house—Gold & Greed argues that this spirit of outdoor exploration made the ordeal worth it. Whether or not you believe this conclusion is entirely up to you.
What Gold & Greed’s Director Has to Say
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Gold & Greed’s director and executive producer, Jared McGilliard, who gave me the backstory on how the film came together.
OUTSIDE: Did you have any misgivings about having the documentary also serve as the launchpad for Justin Posey’s new treasure hunt?
McGilliard: Justin announcing that he’s hid a treasure in this series might be the first page of his new treasure hunt, but in my mind, it’s also the final page of his story searching for Forrest Fenn’s treasure. My focus was telling Justin’s story intimately and truthfully from beginning to end. To not include his new treasure hunt at the end of this series would have been not fully embracing the true arc of his story…and the impact Forrest and his treasure had on Justin’s life.
You chose four different groups of Fenn hunters to profile. What led you to each one?
The common ingredient was that they were all deeply obsessed. They had searched for years, and they all had highs and lows within their experiences. With all of them, they had this first chapter where they go out there, and over time they get deeper into it, and the hunt takes on more meaning—I’m going to solve the poem. I didn’t want to tell surface-level stories, I wanted to find stories where there were stakes and high ranges of emotion. Tragedy, beauty, adventure. I was also looking for a broad range of socioeconomic points of view, so I could show what finding the treasure really meant to them. And finally I wanted people with different strategies. Since this is Netflix it has to be a fun ride. You want the audience to grasp onto different subjects and root for them.
What did you learn about the human condition from following these groups?
One thing that’s top of mind is that we all create our different versions of truth, and that trumps everything else. People had these ideas about the poem that oh, this can’t be just a coincidence, even though the poem is so vague that it could literally fit anywhere. I could walk out of my own backdoor and find connections in the woods behind my house. The wonderful thing is that people made these amazing memories, but letting go of the thing was nearly impossible.
I have to imagine that other filmmakers were chasing this project. How did you get it?
I would say relationships helped me. I spent a year creating deep relationships with these subjects. So, when the Fenn family got in touch with us, and I flew to Santa Fe, they wanted to know what about the story was important to me, and I could tell them. I can tell a story that is not disposable, and one that the general audience will understand. I have that level of trust and depth with the subjects, and I can handle the story with care. I know that when were pitching our film there were other companies pitching it too. But we had invested in these subjects.
What do you hope the audience learns from the film?
We often just think about the outcome: whether it’s a win or a loss. I got the treasure or I didn’t. But these people have so many wins and losses throughout their journey, and it brings them together. The Hurst family alone—the wife almost leaves the family because of this. They mortgage their house, and when they get to the end and don’t find the treasure, they say it saved their lives because it gave them purpose. Cynthia Meechum has no regrets. Each one of these people went out there, and none of them came back holding a box of treasure, but their lives were changed for the better. When I think about why Forrest did this, it was so people would dream and have adventures and find a new side of themselves.
The post Forrest Fenn’s Treasure Is Hidden Again. The Clues Are in a Netflix Documentary. appeared first on Outside Online.
