(Editor’s Note: While we are away at a blogging conference, please enjoy this encore post which originally appeared on June 20, 2014. Also, please make sure to enter for your chance to win a $100 gift card using the Rafflecopter widget following the post!)

At some point during the course of our childhood, every young boy dreams of going on a treasure hunt. We pretend to travel through caves and shipwrecks, mountains and jungles, solving clues and battling evil forces on our way to finding treasure chests stuffed with riches. Countless movies and stories have been made and told around just this premise (Indiana Jones and the Goonies, anybody?). But, as we grow up, we usually let go of these silly boyhood dreams, realizing that there are no hidden treasures to be found. Well, Forrest Fenn has given us all a chance to relive our boyhood fantasies and made a hidden treasure a reality.

For those of you who may not have heard, Forrest Fenn is the eccentric New Mexico art dealer and gajillionaire who decided to hide a treasure chest filled with approximately $2 million worth of rare coins, gold nuggets, gemstones, and jewelry somewhere in the mountains north of Santa Fe. After receiving a cancer diagnosis in 1988, Fenn came up with the idea to hide this bronze chest in the mountains and die along side of it. Mr. Fenn survived the illness and waited until he was about 80 years old to move forward with his plan to hide the treasure.

Our hunt for the Forrest Fenn treasure begins

Upon reading Forrest Fenn’s book The Thrill of the Chase a few years ago, my brother-in-law Brian became interested in the treasure. He told my wife Holly about it, and she interviewed him for a couple of different websites – after which, the two of them became friends. Brian decided that he was going to search for the treasure himself and asked me if I would come with him to New Mexico. Always up for an adventure, I happily obliged, and we started making plans. After weeks of studying poems, books, and maps, we determined our precise search area and hopped a plane to New Mexico. [Read more…]