A huge congrats to Wade VanLandingham whose perseverance and determination paid off!  Since July 24, 2010, The Cowboy’s buried cache of over $1000 cash waited to be found! Cryptic clues, given in a book published by Domino Ireland, eventually led Wade to the location of the hidden treasure.  Let’s learn more about the journey to the ‘Found Treasure’ ending!  Enjoy!

Six Questions with Wade:

  • 1Q) Congrats on finding the cache! When did you first begin to work on the Cowboy Treasure Hunt? Had you researched other treasure hunts before Cowboy or was it your first one?

Thanks!

I first heard about and started working on the Cowboy treasure hunt in late 2013. I had been working on the Forrest Fenn poem, and one path or another led me to learn that there were other puzzles in the world, and a fantastic online community of people working on them, both as setters and hunters. I stumbled onto Cowboy, and it hooked itself into my brain and I’ve been working to unhook it, ever since.

I’ve worked on and solved other puzzles along the way (including one of yours!!), but this is the only one I’ve worked on for this long. (I mostly stopped thinking about Fenn several years ago, after 3 failed trips out west.)

  • 2Q) There had been some concern that the Cowboy’s buried cache was missing, because a few hunters had searched the believed area, and came up empty. However, recently, in May 2020, Domino confirmed it was still there.  Was this added confidence all it took to find it, or had you solved some additional clues for pinpointing the location?  Had you searched for the cache before?

Domino did an AMAZING job of not giving any extra hints or clues in personal discussions. I’m sure he was annoyed with me at various times, because I would email him with questions, secretly hoping for some tiny slip of the tongue that would help me out, but he never made that mistake.

In late 2017, I was one of the hunters near the site asking the kinds of questions that led him to wonder whether the treasure had been disturbed or been found but not reported. At that point, he advised people not to make the trip to Kentucky until he could verify it. It’s about a 700 mile drive for me, so I followed his advice. I mean, who would make a drive like that without knowing it’s actually still there?? I checked the Cowboy treasure website on a random basis over the next couple years, and a few weeks ago, when he posted that he had verified it, I made the arrangements and headed to the site, the following week. I didn’t do any new research, I was confident where I wanted to go, and just went. Turns out, I was a little off in my thinking, but being in the area, gave me the inspiration for the final leap of faith that I needed to find the goodies.

  • 3Q) The book holds numerous codes, ciphers, and puzzles to solve.  Can you share some of your journey on what it took to solve the clues? How difficult (or easy) would you rate the puzzles?  And how did these all come together to lead you to the location of the Cash!

The Cowboy treasure book is about 70 pages total, with about 45 pages of text that make up the Cowboy story. Starting as early as the book’s cover, as you said, there are codes, ciphers, puzzles and images that were all designed to lead the hunter to a specific area in the Land Between The Lakes National Recreation Area, that straddles the border between western Kentucky and Tennessee.

It’s difficult to know for sure, but I would estimate there are close to 100 puzzles that were written into the book. Some were obvious red herrings, but most would gradually narrow the scope of the search. There are several that get the hunter to the State of Kentucky. Then some to get you into Trigg County. Then into the LBL, then to a roughly 1 mile circle. And finally, into a specific area with a lone tree. I ended up solving a couple of puzzles for each of those steps, so it is obvious that Domino was creating puzzles to ensure that whatever solution “style” the hunter was thinking in, they would be able to locate the treasure.

The difficulty of the puzzles range from mild to wild!

Some were trivial. For example if you remove every other letter from NOOPTUIJNOHIABWXABIJIJOPRSABLMABSTKLAB the answer is NOT IN HAWAII OR ALASKA. Which, of course, is actually the very first clue to reduce the search area from “the United States” down to something more manageable. Nothing left but the details, right? :-).

On the other hand, there are probably still 1/3 of them that I never solved. Whether my brain doesn’t think along those lines, or they are actually that difficult, I don’t know.

An example of one of the more complex puzzles was the one that was the equivalent of “walk from the skull rock to the dead tree and then ten paces south and dig.” It was actually two puzzles merged together. The gist of it went like this:

1) A standard word search puzzle in the beginning of the book
2) But to find the CORRECT words, first you have to shift all the letters in the grid down by 6.
3) Then you have to search and find the words.
4) Then you have to figure out what the 6 words had in common.
5) Then find the appropriate song or text they’re in.
6) Which turns out was NOT the most obvious song based on the words.
7) At the same time, you had to realize that a different puzzle near the end of the book is a Beale or book cipher.
8) Then we have to make the connection that the two puzzles go together. (The song from the word search is the text to the Beale cipher.)
9) Then the word to word decoding. (But there are multiple lyrics versions online, and most produce the wrong cipher answer!)
10) Finally, the answer itself literally told you to forget about the most likely solution and follow your intuition.

That’s a huge number of steps to get to what boiled down to the very last piece of the puzzle that let us dig up the box. And in the end, probably turned out to be the piece that actually solved it in my mind. While I was on site, I was following the puzzle solutions literally and failing. But I began letting my mind drift away from the puzzle’s answers, and began following my intuition, and within another 10 minutes, I was poking a shovel onto that bright orange box at a location about 1/2 mile from where I thought it was when I got there.

It was a very strange feeling to shift that far so suddenly.

  • 4Q) After all these years, I’m sure it was an exciting find.  When digging, and seeing the orange cache, what thoughts went through your mind? What did you enjoy most about The Cowboy treasure hunt?

Truly, it was about the closure of the hunt. After so many years, and so much random frustration with some of the puzzles, and the frustration at the site in 2017, followed by the uncertainty of the hunt itself for a few years, knowing that it was done and that I had solved it, was a great feeling.

I solved a hunt in California in 2016 for $1,000 and that one gave me pleasure for the money. This one, for $1,100, gave me all the pleasure for the discovery. 
It’s funny to think like that, because I think most of us start a hunt believing it’s about finding the loot, but in the end, it’s almost never life changing money, but it frequently IS a life changing experience.

  • 5Q) What was your most challenging part of the Cowboy Treasure Hunt? Had you ever almost given up? From your experience, do you have any advice for other ‘treasure hunters’?  

I actually TRIED to give up in 2017, when I was on site 2 different times, and couldn’t find it. I was very frustrated to have made the drive twice and come up empty handed. But I was pressed for time, on both occasions, and could not give it a proper search. But I cooled off during 2018 and 2019 when it was up in the air, and when it was verified there was never any doubt in my mind I’d go look again. And of course, this time I budgeted an appropriate amount of time to search. I relaxed a bit, and it made all the difference in the world.

I did learn something valuable during this particular hunt…

Be careful about taking outside advice, or input into your solutions. Even comments from the setter may mistakenly lead you astray!

Whether it’s Domino Ireland, Forrest Fenn, Jenny Kile or another author, the hunt setter put everything you’re likely to need into the original work. Additional information that they release, or that other hunters speculate about, may cloud your judgment and actually lead you away from your final target spot. That certainly happened to me in this case, and it was only rectified by some quiet reflection in the field.

Discussions with others may open new ideas for you, but you have to be very careful to incorporate them into your solutions.

  • 6Q) Now that the hunt is over, will you be working on other treasure hunts? What other projects or hobbies do you enjoy?

Absolutely! I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the Bossall Treasure hunt by Douglas Pearson for a while now. I like to think I’m making progress in there, but until all the pieces fall into place, you never know.

I also understand that Domino is thinking of releasing Cowgirl sometime in the future. We’ll have to all watch his site, and get excited for that!

I’d like to thank Domino for the Cowboy treasure hunt.

I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to do this interview and your fantastic website.

I’d like to thank my mom for her help and critiques and believing in me enough to travel with me for this crazy obsession of finding the Cowboy Treasure.
And finally, my wife, for putting up with me and this foolishness. 😉

LOTS MORE TREASURE HUNTING FUN! (Treasure Hunts)

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