Portland podcaster’s ‘Missed Fortune’ tells the story of a Seattle treasure hunter

In 2010, an eccentric art dealer named Forrest Fenn announced that he had buried a treasure box full of gold and jewels somewhere in the wilderness that could be found simply by solving the clues in a poem he had self-published. Thousands of people devoted themselves to the search, some of them to the detriment of their lives. “Missed Fortune,” the new podcast from Portland journalist Peter Frick-Wright, tells the story of one of those treasure hunters, Darrell Seyler. Frick-Wright joins us to share more.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller:  We end today with the hunt for hidden treasure. In 2010, an eccentric man named Forrest Fenn announced that he had put a treasure chest full of gold and jewels worth millions of dollars somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. To find the treasure all people had to do was decipher the clues he had written in a poem. Fenn did this, he said, to encourage families to get out in the great outdoors and to have some fun. Some people did have fun, but others became obsessed, so obsessed that they lost everything including their lives. Now the Portland journalist, Peter Frick-Wright, has created a new podcast series, all about that obsession. It’s called “Missed Fortune” and he joins us now to talk about it. When did you first hear about Forrest Fenn and his hidden treasure?

Peter Frick-Wright:  I was planning a backpacking trip to Yellowstone in 2014 and my girlfriend at the time, and I were sort of bouncing ideas back and forth. She sent me this article about a guy who had been washed downstream on a treasure hunt and then had been banned from the park and then arrested two weeks later, back looking for this treasure. And my first thought was, ‘oh she sent me some Clickbait. You know it gets everyone from time to time. There’s no way this is real’. But then I got back from that backpacking trip, started reading a little bit more about it and it turns out it was real. And I just started asking around. What is this, what’s going on? And eventually, you know, it’s just a couple of conversations and someone said, ‘I think Forrest Fenn would talk to you, just send him an email, he’s looking to promote this, just see what happens, give him a ring’.

Miller:  Who was Forrest Fenn?

Frick-Wright:  So he was a guy who had started out as a military pilot, a fighter pilot, and then sort of walked away from that life after becoming disillusioned with Vietnam. He ended up in Santa Fe, New Mexico as an art dealer and kind of got this reputation, even before the treasure hunt, as someone that was working different angles almost all the time. Whether that’s with artwork, he made a lot of money sort of famously selling forgeries as forgeries. He popularized, like, made it cool to own a fake painting. And he would do things like find artists and talk up their talents, publish a book about them and then it turns out that he was the person who owned most of their work. And so he was basically driving the price up. So in the late eighties, he got a cancer diagnosis and decided, ‘I’m not someone who’s going to die in a hospital’ and he created this treasure hunt as kind of his parting gift to the world or partying mystery. And then he got a slight curve ball when he survived the cancer. So this whole treasure hunt didn’t start until 2010 when he decided, ‘you know, I’m 80 years old now. It’s time to start this and see where it goes’.

Miller:   I want to play a clip from one of your episodes.  It is Forrest Fenn talking about how he thinks about the ancient objects that he or other people discover:

Forrest Fenn:  I’ll turn over some dirt with a trial and there’s a stone axe there that has been resting there for let’s say 800 years. But why? Who made that? How did he make it? What tools did he use? Why did he leave it there? What did he use it for? What is it? What value is an antique, except to tweak your mind, to take you to a different dimension.

Frick-Wright:  For Fenn, the value of an object isn’t in the story it tells. It’s in the emotion that object can produce for someone. He’s basically making an argument that it’s okay to own this stuff. Archaeologists and academics say no, these artifacts belong to the past and should be preserved for the future, in a museum. So don’t touch them. Fenn says these items belong to the present. So everyone please touch. What do you say to the idea that, I mean in a museum you have thousands of people coming through and you greatly increase the chance of something happening, of breaking something, if you let people touch it.

Fenn:  So what? You have another 500 in the basement. Why do we worship these things? Let somebody break one once in a while. It’s not that big a deal. Why are we worshiping these things?

Miller:  That is Forrest Fenn being interviewed by my guest Peter Frick-Wright for the new podcast “Missed Fortune”. Peter, what did you come to see in terms of the connection between Fenn’s philosophy, that we just heard there, and the treasure hunt that he created?

Frick-Wright:  That’s a complicated question. And there’s a way to look at the treasure hunt as a kind of final message to this group of people that he was in constant conflict with. I mean in addition to selling fine art paintings and sculptures and things, Fenn would deal in Native American artifacts at his gallery in Santa Fe. And so he was out looking for things. He grew up collecting arrowheads with his dad and talks about that time of his life really fondly and then just kept searching for things in canyons in the southwest and all over the world actually throughout his life. And there’s a way to view the treasure hunt. You know, he was finding these things and putting them on display and trading in them. And it was about the transaction. Or it was about the kind of thing that he did to get this item.

I talked to him at his house, among his collection of things. And he didn’t have much to say about the history of the object or the story that it came from. It was about the emotion, as I said in the clip, the emotion that it produced in him. And there’s a way to look at the treasure hunt as a statement. He wants to bring people the same joy that he got in finding things but without the baggage of cultural context or archaeological relevance. And his thesis, of playing down the context and the relevance of the things he found, put him at odds with archaeologists. He wanted people to delight the same way that he had, without having to go through the hoops that he had to jump through when people would challenge him on some of the things that he had found.

Miller: I want to play another piece from an episode. And here, we’re going to hear a conversation that you had with a treasure hunter named Darrell Seyler who is really the focus of this series. This is an excerpt from the first episode of the podcast:

Frick-Wright:  How is this hunting for the treasure different from gambling?

Darrell Seyler:  Not a damn thing different, not a, my mom is a gambler. My brother has a huge gambling problem. Hell I got into that awhile. Anybody with any sort of a closeness to an addictive personality, something that you enjoy, that your mind and your body enjoys, no different whatsoever, no different. You’re hiding it from the people that care about you. You’re having to decoy it. You’re having to lie about it. It consumes you when you’re asleep, when you’re awake. You want to talk about it. You want to but you can’t. There’s guilt, there’s happiness, there’s lothe. I mean there’s nothing different and you really just can’t, there’s no answer to it. And to fix until something drastic happens. I mean, gosh, you know, and one thing did. I mean I got fired.

Miller:  That seems a sad impression. And one thing that struck me, I’ve heard this a couple times now, is that when he says ‘the only thing that’s gonna fix it’ and you think he’s gonna say, I thought he was gonna say ‘the fix is you find the treasure’. He doesn’t even say that. There’s a kind of awareness the fix is just something terrible happened which also seems sadly pressioned. Can you give us a sense for what Darrell went through?

Frick-Wright:  Yeah, Darrell’s journey, I mean, you know, I met him, he was the guy that was washed down the river that I had initially read about. I interviewed Fenn and that interview was really contentious and tough. It was a tough interview. And then I thought I needed to go talk to this guy who, seemingly, was super obsessed. And pretty early on, it became clear that - you know, I wanted this to be sort of a fun treasure hunt story- the place that Darryl was coming to it from was like he was looking for something much bigger than this treasure.

And he kept making choices. He went back to Yellowstone after he’d been taken out of the park by search and rescue, was arrested, had lost his job. He was, at one point, living out of his car and still searching for the treasure on Mcdonald’s wifi. And so it sort of became, at a certain point, a question of what Darrell is actually looking for? Deep down here, what is the thing that is driving him, the thing that’s motivating him? And it turned out to be, in some sense, like sort of a cliche or like the thing that’s motivating all of us, which is just the kind of formative experiences that you have as a kid. His head involved looking for things, being on treasure hunts, finding things and being rewarded for that. And then also his childhood has just been very, very difficult in unique ways that played right into his being a receptive audience for what Fenn was giving to people.

Miller:  One of the interesting wrinkles to this story is that in a number of places, you described that while Darrell and other people who are sort of looking for some kind of meaning in their lives or to turn their lives around in the form of this treasure hunt, you - as you were telling their story - were also searching and and also trying to turn your life around. I mean what was going on in your life when you started reporting on this?

This was very nearly the first story that I even tried to do as an audio story. I’d been writing for magazines for a couple of years. When I met Darryl, I had just gone to this program where they teach you how to use a recorder and put stories together. Then I landed in Darryl’s lap and I’ve just been to this miniature grad school program. I had no money. I had no magazine stories lined up. I was scraping together a living and very much trying to be a storyteller, someone who got to go on adventures and then tell people about it, whether in print or in audio. And I knew that I was right on the edge. You know, I had borrowed a car to drive to Santa Fe to interview Fenn because I didn’t have enough money in my account to afford the gas in the car that I had at the time. So I borrowed a Prius and then slept in the back of it all the way there and at rest stops.

Miller: It’s remarkably similar to what the treasure hunters themselves were doing, borrowing stuff and just barely scraping by.

Frick-Wright:  Yep, I mean there’s very much a way in which I was just on a different treasure hunt. Both Darrell and I were on treasure hunts. I was just looking for something slightly different than he was.

Miller:  You found it though, in a sense, right? I mean, you’re a writer/producer for Outside Magazine. The story you wrote about him ended up getting awards. It propelled you forward on your career. You now have a top-rated Apple podcast. That hasn’t happened, right? For Darrell?

In some ways. No, I mean, in the most in the most superficial way. No, he did not find the treasure. He was devastated when, in 2020, it was announced that it was found. At the same time, it was never about the treasure itself. He was looking for a feeling that he got from this treasure hunt. And that’s what kind of kept me interested in him and kept me interested in this treasure hunt, even after that magazine article. And after I spent seven years going out on treasure hunts at various points - and they’re not even all in the podcast - there were times Darrell would call me from his search area and be like, ‘I need your help with some ropes. I got to repel down this thing and I can’t do it by myself’. And I’m like, okay, I’ll drive out there”. So it was a deeper relationship than a treasure hunt on its own, for one purely motivated by finding riches, would have fostered between the two of us.

Miller:  We just have less than a minute left. But did you get gold fever when you were surrounded by all these people who were so obsessed? Did you ever think I want to find this thing too?

Frick-Wright:  There were a couple of times that I thought I knew where it was, but I thought we were on the right track and that we had moved through the clues in a way that we were getting closer. And I felt a little bit of that thrill. But I think I spent enough time around Darrell and around other people that would claim, to their bones, they know where it is and ‘we just have to go get it’. And I think it helped me recognize that any sort of confidence in a treasure hunt devised by a tricky old man is misplaced. You know, you don’t know until you actually get there.

Miller:  You gotta watch out for this tricky old man. Peter Frick-Wright, thanks very much for joining us.

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