Forrest Fenn Gold Medallion Treasure Hunt #8 Solution and Winner

Another successfully claimed Forrest Fenn Gold Medallion! Congrats to Katie and Justin W.! Clues for FFGM treasure hunt #8 were released early afternoon on April 24th, and they had solved and found the hidden coded treasure stone to claim the Medallion by 8 that night! Way to go!

The Clues and Video were as follow:

So how was it solved?

While there are ciphers to solve for confirmation of the stones location, they were not needed. These were all optional. The stone was found by intuitiveness and a bit of research on keywords found in the poem and images. Katie and Justin solved it perfectly in that way!

Here is their summary of events for their afternoon:

So we did not solve any ciphers or decode anything to find the stone, although I am curious to see the solutions. A little bit of luck, and some creative googling led us to it. We started with a guess that the location was in Vermont. We kind of figured that at least one of the last few hunts would be located in the northern portion of the Appalachian Mountains, and the green triangle at the bottom seems to be a reference to the Green Mountains of VT.

From there, I googled a few key words; green waters, quarry, Vermont. I read about a few quarries in VT, and then started adding quarry names to the google search. When I added “Dorset”, one of the results was a link to Emerald Lake State Park. On the website for the park, there is a description of the history of the quarry, including a mention of the rail system used to move the large stones. This stood out to me because you can see railroad tracks in the background of the video that was posted with the treasure hunt.

I dropped the little google guy onto the map to look at the road near the park, and I located the spot pretty quickly. There was a distinct cliff on the side of the road that can be seen in the video, and the pull-off and guardrail were a clear match. We figured that since we solved this pretty quick, we stood a chance of getting to the stone before anyone else. My husband and brother-in-law made the three hour drive to East Dorset, and got to the stone by about 8:00pm.

A big thanks to you Jenny, and to Dal and Forrest for the adventure! My whole family works on these treasure hunts together and we have a blast. We even have a trip out west planned for this summer to find the treasure chest, it will look nice next to my new medallion.

Congrats and great slueth work! Well deserved!

Below is a full account of the clues:

The ‘Green Mountain’ in the bottom right hinted to the Green Mountains of Vermont, as mentioned.

One might then notice the ‘First Letters’ of words within the Green Triangle/Mountain spell DORSET—confirming location by an anagram.

The numbers 11 4 16 3 above the DORSET clue gave VT by counting Word/Letter in central poem.

The string of numbers at the top were Morse Code. 1 was dot. 2 was Dash. 3 was space. They revealed: March Forth into the State. Vermont was admitted to the Union/became a state on March 4, 1791. Just another confirmer for the State/VT.

The letter pairs on the left side were also used to give Word/Letter in central poem. D is the 4^th letter of the alphabet- so 4^th word. C is the third letter- so third letter of the 4^th word. DC/4 3 for U. Following this system it revealed US Seven/US 7- the main route/highway the stone was hidden.

The different colored letters- ANOTIST above the X, and TESREL below the X, can be decoded to reveal Rutland and Pownal. Two Towns – above and below— where the stone was hidden. The numbers on the sides confirmed their correct order. I’m not revealing the system at this moment.

But most importantly, and as Katie and Justin proved, it was the actual words in the central poem, with the visual clue of Green Mountain, and background image that could have been used to discover the location of the hidden treasure stone used to claim the Medallion and Doodles!

Thanks all for participating in the Forrest Fenn Gold Medallion Treasure Hunts. The last two of the first series are scheduled to be released on May 8 and May 22!