Six Questions with Jack Stuef:
Each of us, who had decided to take up Forrest’s dare, to study the clues and thread a tract through the wiles of nature and circumstance to the treasure, knew only one person would eventually come out of that labyrinth with the gold. It was Jack Stuef who completed that mission on June 6th, 2020. From his accounts, he has said he did just what Forrest dared him to do. He studied the clues, followed the path, and found the treasure. He accomplished the near impossible. Congrats to Jack for completing the task. It is well deserved.
The Thrill of the Chase by Forrest Fenn was more than a memoir, or even that dare. It was Forrest’s way to inspire families from all across the world to get out and enjoy the Quest like he had done throughout his life. His love for the Rocky Mountains, specifically the area of Yellowstone, where he spent his summers growing up, prompted him to write about his adventures and include a poem with no name. It was 9 clues in that poem which Forrest said would lead a person to a hidden treasure valued at over a million dollars. And they did.
From the first MW’s Six Questions with Forrest we can be assured of how Jack felt when he discovered the chest. Forrest wrote: “One thing is certain, when a person discovers that beautiful bronze chest and opens it for the first time and sees the bracelet with hundreds of rubies, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds, and the 265 gold coins and hundreds of placer nuggets, he will be in awe.”
Awe. What a small but all-encompassing emotion.
Let’s learn more about the journey to open up that lid from Jack- the finder of Forrest Fenn’s Treasure! Congrats again to Jack! Enjoy!
Six Questions with Jack:
1Q) Thank you so much Jack for participating in the final Six Questions on Forrest Fenn’s The Thrill of the Chase. I hope they will help bring closure to how each of us took up our own hunt for the treasure; that they will encourage us to apply the wisdom gained from the experience Forrest gave us; and to peacefully move on to ever greater Chases within our lives. The Forrest Fenn Treasure was found, but the Chase of life is never-ending. Much awaits.
You have explained some of how you worked the solution. How you discerned the general location for where Forrest would have wanted to die. Can you share more of how you worked through that process and further pursued the poem? Was it one ‘aha’ moment that rapidly connected everything, or was each piece and clue a struggle to connect and follow? What caused you to be so confident of the one spot, never wavering from it, even after numerous days of failure? Was there a day you almost gave up?
There is a great investor named Charlie Munger who helms Berkshire Hathaway with Warren Buffett. Munger is turning 97 in a few weeks, and he’s the most rational person I’ve ever seen, only sharpening with age. He has a lecture called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment” that inspired my own YouTube video on the treasure hunt back in 2019. I think if I ever wrote a book on the chase, it would be at least as interesting to explore how people didn’t figure it out as how I did. Anyway, I heard Munger once say that, “a problem fully understood is half solved.” And I think that kind of approach was key.
I wanted to exhaustively read, watch, and listen to every single article about the chase wherein Forrest was quoted and every interview he ever gave on the subject to understand, as well as I could, the nature of the problem at hand. I tracked down all those primary sources and went over them multiple times, which is many hours of work, but each time I went through them, I understood Forrest and what he was trying to do with the poem better, each time making connections between different things he said in different places.
I’m also a fan of Robert Caro, who has been at work on a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning Lyndon Johnson biographies for more than 40 years. (A prominent source in his books is Forrest’s friend and former business partner John Connally, so it was fun for me to get a chance to talk with Forrest about him.) Caro is 85 and is just now getting to the bulk of Johnson’s presidency. He’s the greatest researcher I’ve ever seen, and he’s written a great book on the subject called Working, in which he details the most important advice on research he got from an early editor: “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.” That to me is what I did: I approached researching this hunt with an open mind and with an eye for detail, and I did it exhaustively. I was rewarded with not only a deeper appreciation of Forrest and his methods, but was also surprised to find two subtle slip-ups Forrest made that ended up having a major impact on my ideas about where the treasure lied.
After fully understanding the nature of the problem, I had to actually solve it, of course. That meant reading The Thrill of the Chase and its poem but also every personal story Forrest wrote of his life. When he published that book, he had no idea his stories would find such a receptive audience, and he became an almost compulsive memoirist, sharing a huge volume of stories of his life throughout the decade. The poem is like many of those stories in that it reflects his point of view and his emotions on a journey that was important to him, so to me, it was important to see it not as a separate work of writing defined by its unique purpose, but rather within that broader context.
So yes, I was thinking about clues and looking and maps and trying to piece everything together in that phase, but I also tried to incorporate everything I knew about the nature of the hunt and everything I knew about how he thought and what was important to him. And when I started to feel like I had certain concepts down, and I felt like I knew what region the treasure was in and what sort of “solve” we needed, I did incorporate some other information from other sources that have nothing to do with Forrest Fenn that I felt could help inform me.
Eventually, one night I felt like I had a beat on the right sequence of clues leading to a specific sort of spot, and within a couple hours, I had pieced together the evidence. Suddenly, when I found one certain bit of evidence, I did have that “aha moment” and quickly booked an early morning flight out West. I was not certain at that point, but I thought I had enough evidence it was likely there to go out and look for it.
When I went boots on the ground, my conception of the path in the poem I had put together from home was matched by the physical features I went to, but I did some additional reconnaissance on some other areas I thought could hold potential for matching parts of the poem because I didn’t want to get locked into one idea and lose any objectivity I had. But that first place I went to was the correct location.
Obviously, I didn’t find it on my few trips in 2018, so I had to face the prospect that the treasure probably wasn’t there. I tried my best to consider other spots, but late in 2018 I had another “aha moment” and encountered enough new circumstantial evidence that I felt the total body of evidence I had collected to that point definitively proved that was where Forrest wanted to die, as daunting as it was to keep looking in a spot that had been a loser for me.
Forrest once said he thought the treasure may be found by the person who could best adjust, and it was certainly true that I had to adjust my approach along the way. I think I figured out where it was by being relentlessly goal-oriented, remembering that the poem itself is not the point, but rather the special place where he wished he could have died. But I think the next phase, boots on the ground, rewarded a process-oriented approach, putting in the methodical work out in the woods required to find the blaze. The research phase probably played more to my strengths, so I had to work harder at creating a good boots-on-the-ground approach to actually find the thing, and I was thrown for an additional curveball when I realized the blaze had probably been damaged by natural forces.
- 2Q) Over the years Forrest had mentioned searchers had solved the first two clues. What do you feel kept them from realizing the other 7 and finding the Treasure? Were you stuck at that point as well? What was your most challenging part of the poem to understand? Do you feel this is the same for most?
I tried to get into not only Forrest’s psychology, but also the psychology of those people who had been close without realizing it, based on tidbits Forrest had given out over the years. To me it was clear there was something in the back half of the second stanza that was a huge difficulty for people to figure out, forming a bottleneck there. So when I was figuring out the clues, I was looking for something in that section that would not be an easy guess but would require some real effort to see things from his perspective.
So I was certainly looking for a challenge in that section, and it seemed fitting that was the part of the poem that felt most like solving a riddle to me. But in talking to Forrest after I found the treasure, he did not purposefully design the clue there as a riddle. It was just how he saw things.
One of the biggest challenges of the poem for me was that I could not say for certain how one particular word was defined for Forrest at the location. It ended up being the definition I thought was most likely to be correct, but that uncertainty meant I had to expand the bounds of the section of forest in which I knew the treasure to be located in order to be as objective and thorough as possible.
- 3Q) It seems to me the biggest issues for many searchers was making false assumptions. You mention this in your video on Confirmation Bias. What advice can you offer those looking for the location today? Not so much about the biases (as said, we have an excellent video on that already), but can you share if any or all of the ‘Clues’ can be confirmed? Was the discovery of Where Warm Waters Halt key or had you discovered there was an actual key word, and if so, can you share what it was/is?
Yes, to me there is more than enough evidence sitting in front of all of us to prove beyond a reasonable doubt where the location of the treasure chest was and to what the clues referred. It’s difficult but not impossible. But it probably edges on impossible to determine the exact spot without the treasure still sitting there because the blaze has taken so much damage, it’s difficult to “read” as the blaze at this point in time.
A lot of people have asked me about “a word that is key,” so I’m glad you brought that up. To me, that’s a good example of the perils of groupthink. Reading that quote in context in your 2014 Six Questions with Forrest, I didn’t think there was any reason to think “a word that is key” was anything other than a rather unremarkable observation that many people were ignoring an important element of the poem. But I’m aware that some people on the internet have created a whole mythology around that comment, coming together to develop the idea not of “a word that is key” but rather “The Keyword” that somehow unlocks everything in the poem.
That never made any logical sense to me. If there were such a word, wouldn’t he have announced that in The Thrill of the Chase itself rather than bury it in an offhand remark in 2014? Wouldn’t it be something he was talking about and stressing to us all the time?
My guess was always that was just an observation he made in the moment, and he probably wouldn’t even remember six years later to what word in the poem he had been referring. I did ask him after finding the treasure if he remembered, and he said no.
There is no shortcut to the poem. You really have to understand the whole thing to have any confidence.
- 4Q) Meeting Forrest Fenn, as the finder, had to be a most memorable moment. You have shared some of those emotions in articles and varying sources. When you sat with Forrest, though, did you crave clarifications for meanings to the clues, or had the location, and the directions to get there all fall into place, and you knew why that particular spot was very special to Forrest already? Can you share what questions Forrest had for you? What did you feel was most striking about meeting him? Had he surprised you in any way, or was he just how you imagined?
When I figured out that something had probably happened to the blaze, I thought it could take years or even decades for me to find the treasure. I didn’t even know if I would find it in my lifetime. I wrote down the location of the treasure somewhere with a detailing of the evidence and the progress I made on the ground so that my family could take up the search if something happened to me. So I definitely didn’t take it for granted that I would ever get to meet him, let alone talk with him openly about what everything meant, and that will always be a highlight of my life.
I don’t think I could have figured it out without coming to understand at least part of what made the place special to him, but he did provide a little additional color to that for me, and I’m sure he kept some of it to himself that maybe I would not even have been able to understand. He could have complicated emotional connections to places, as we saw in “My War for Me” with his association between the Vietnam waterfall and Philadelphia from his cockpit.
It was certainly strange to be in the presence of someone I had spent so much time thinking about and analyzing but never met before, and I think I said elsewhere that I couldn’t turn my analytical mind off and it was something like information overload having all that stimuli mere feet from me. But I suppose he was pretty much exactly what I thought he would be like, and I could tell it was a major moment for him as well. He enjoyed hearing me tell how I figured it out and being able to see the treasure again after so many years.
- 5Q) It was mentioned the ‘Blaze’ was damaged. Can you expound on this more? Is it correct in saying that if you find the ‘Blaze’, and look quickly down, the location of the chest ‘was’ right there, without question. Is this ‘Blaze’ an unmistakable ‘Blaze’ made by or used by Forrest? Can the discovery of the Blaze still be used to Confirm where the ‘treasure chest’s’ location once was? If not, how can a searcher be confident in the location, if they’d like to continue searching for it?
Helped by logic, my experience on the ground at the location, and a hint in the book, I figured out what the blaze was in late 2018. I think it was a mistake for me to go out there before that looking for something to just stand out to me and not knowing what it was I was actually looking for. As Forrest said, it’s not the kind of thing you can expect to find on spring break or an afternoon picnic. It took slow and methodical effort on the ground to find. A necessary defense of the blaze was to make it something that could be found, but not so readily obvious, so that in case a human being did happen to go there, they wouldn’t stumble on the treasure.
As I’ve said, I think the blaze is too damaged to be easily “read” as the blaze at this point in time without the treasure still sitting in the nook beneath it. But I don’t think many realize that was part of the design.
Forrest always said he was ambivalent about whether he wanted the treasure to be found in his lifetime, and for some reason, people doubted that and decided they knew better about his true feelings. But over the course of my searching, I realized how profound that ambivalence really was. The blaze and the treasure were out in the elements, so he left it to fate and nature to decide how difficult the treasure hunt would be at any given point, and as he said, it would get more difficult over time.
Forrest said the things the clues referred to might exist in 100 years. Not may, might. There was doubt there. Fate would decide what happened to the blaze, and we were unlucky that it was damaged relatively early in the search by natural forces.
The main reason I think Forrest wouldn’t say whether the treasure was buried or not was that he didn’t know. It was left on the ground, but not on level ground. It was left in a nook where it would likely sink some over time due to the weight and dirt and weeds would blow in around it and pine needles and other forest debris would fall on top of it. Nature was burying it over time. I felt fortunate that I found it early enough in the hunt that, while it was covered by debris, I could tell something was there, and the lid was still above the surface of the ground. At some point in the future, the treasure was likely going to be fully buried, and things would have been that much more difficult.
I eventually felt like I was competing against people in the future. I had the time advantage of getting there first, but people in the future likely had better technology at their disposal to find the treasure without the blaze or visual evidence of the treasure being there.
- 6Q) I had to smile at your remark in Daniel Barbarisi’s story of possibly moving into Equities. You mentioned you have my book, so you may know there is a special place for trading in my own heart as well. But this change of course is interesting. You find Forrest’s chest of gold, and decide to go in a different direction for your life. Why is this? Do you feel you would have done this eventually anyway? Or is it solely because the burden of money is off your shoulders? And now with much of the hunt in the past, how do you see your future? How has the Chase changed you?
I think I’m similar to Forrest in not wanting to do the same thing for 15 years, but for me it’s more like 5. I get interested in something new and change course pretty readily, so I guess I have a pretty eclectic background.
I’ve gotten some emails from college students considering medical school, and I hope I’m not seen as discouraging against it. Health care is just about the most important field there is to human life. But med school really wasn’t for me, and I realized that pretty quickly, but the huge student loans made me feel like I had to finish and become a doctor to pay them off. I am in the process of quitting now, but it’s not an experience I wholly regret. I have had the chance to impact a lot of patients’ lives for the better, and that’s really fulfilling.
But med school destroyed my self-confidence. The amount of information one has to learn and be able to recall to become a doctor is staggering, and I lack the full intellectual interest in the science of medicine that drives physicians, so I forgot and had to relearn so many things multiple times. And the Socratic method used on the wards really played poorly into my anxieties. I don’t like to get answers wrong and can get overly sensitive about that on a good day, but it’s made worse when I feel like I may fail another human being whose health is on the line.
The chase was partly so intoxicating to me because I so clearly knew I was right about this big thing (though for the same reason it was the most frustrating experience of my life), and I knew it had the potential to change my life. And knowing I was right helped restore that depleted self-confidence, especially when I found it.
I got obsessed with political futures markets (betting on the results of foreign elections) and took a year off from med school to pursue that. I made some decent money, but it was hard to scale. What I was good at was information arbitrage—putting in the work to find information these markets were unaware of or overlooking and thus made them inefficient. I love the thrill of finding those things and being right when others are wrong and making money that way.
In a way, I think the treasure hunt was an information arbitrage play too for the same reason. I really enjoy finding valuable information that’s being ignored and hope to explore that in the wider world of equities.
For Munger, the value of money is in its ability to confer independence, and I think it’s the same for me. Many people of my generation have student debt that is impacting their ability to make important life milestones like buying a home or starting a family. Having this treasure and selling it will allow me to be free to choose my next chapter(s) in life and explore the world without worry, and for that I’m very grateful to Forrest.
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Jenny, I appreciated all the questions you asked Forrest over the years, so thank you for giving me the honor of having my own Six Questions here on Mysterious Writings. I know I’m a pale comparison to Forrest Fenn, but I hope my answers helped illuminate some things for my fellow searchers.
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