The Lost Treasure Mines of New Mexico Found: An H. Charles Beil Treasure Hunt

The Lost Treasure Mines of New Mexico Found!
An H. Charles Beil Treasure Hunt

Written by TxTH

In July I was introduced to the H. Charles Beil (HCB) treasure hunts by Jenny Kile of Mysterious Writings.  After registering for the Treasure Illustrated web site I became fascinated with the different tales and the idea of pursuing these mysterious treasures.  I decided to focus first on the one closest to me in Texas which was the cache located in the state of New Mexico.  Though I say it was the closest, with 975 miles to the burial site from my house near Houston, that location is only 44 miles further than it is to Ashville, NC.!

First, I must say that HCB does a great job of assembling an entertaining read while intertwining several different treasure tales in the process.  I had not known of many of the stories dating back to the Jesuit priests and that in itself was very informative.  However, the Tale of Doc Noss and Victorio Peak was very familiar to me.  I lived many years in the West Texas area around Wink (look that one up!), Midland, Amarillo, and Lubbock.  I have driven by Victorio Peak on several occasions on vacations to NM and always wondered if the stories were true.

So, with that little background I started looking at the clues HCB had left us.  First was a code that needed to be deciphered and second was an old map to which he had added four figures.  The code was a challenge to break at first but because that is what I have been doing the past few years with armchair treasure hunts, I did finally solve it. Then I found that solving the code sometimes creates as many questions as it answers.  The code deciphered to:

LU ROUTE 40 HOLDS THE KEY LOOK FOR THE SIGN ALONG THE WAY xEG 40

By looking at the old map I felt pretty sure that Route 40 was most probably Interstate 40.  So what did LU and xEG mean?  Using Google Maps, I started searching for the “sign along the way” and found the following just East of Gallup, NM:

This led me to interpret xEG 40 is the East Gallup exit sign.  Now what is the LU.  After searching the area I couldn’t find anything that fit.

I left that puzzle for later and, instead, started looking closer at the old map and trying to “decipher” it as HCB had directed us to do.  Examining the four Padres, as I called them, you can see that they are slightly different sizes and all placed at significant locations on the map: Twin Cones (Twin Knolls today), Remnant Mesa, Mineral Springs, and Pyramid Rock.  The largest Padre is located at Pyramid Rock.  My thinking at this point is that the size of the Padres relates to the perspective of these locations from where the cache was located.  Since the largest Padre is located at Pyramid Rock, I figured the cache must be located on one of the mesas closest to it.  HCB said he buried this cache on a mesa as a tribute to Doc Noss and Victorio Peak. My first choice was these three mesas just North of Pyramid Rock.

I realized after examining this site for a few days that you probably could not see all of the other Padre locations from this vantage point, especially the Mineral Springs.  I changed my idea of the location to the fingers sticking out to the South from Pyramid Rock (the orange ovals) because you can see all four locations from these “mesas”.  I never really was comfortable with this location because the geology just seemed wrong.  I grew up around mesas and generally mesas have a hard rock cap on them (Think Caprock in the Lubbock/Amarillo TX area) and this area around Pyramid Rock was pretty much just slick sandstone with no cap.

Then, two things happened at nearly the same time that changed my entire perspective.  I figured out what LU is and I also found more resources for my solution that were right in front of me the whole time.

Let me explain LU first.  Remember the message from the code was –

LU ROUTE 40 HOLDS THE KEY LOOK FOR THE SIGN ALONG THE WAY xEG 40

I already stated that I felt that xEG 40 is the East Gallup exit sign.  So I followed Interstate 40 all the way to the Arizona/NM border and there it was, the town of Lupton.  This made me think of one of the clues Jenny Kile used in her second scroll puzzle:

ROCK
————
LOOK

That interprets to Look under Rock.

So in HCB’s solution we have Interstate 40 between Lupton and the East Gallup sign.  That rules out Pyramid Rock, Church Rock, Fort Wingate, Red Rock State Park and anything else to the East of that sign.

The second thing I discovered was right there in front of me the whole time.  And that was…     I’m going to let you figure that out on your own because I am not going to say exactly where I found the cache.  I will just say that HCB has given us everything we needed to solve this location if we just opened our eyes and saw.  The final clues that pinpointed the location for me was a closed book and a closed door if you can imagine that.

After much deliberation, my wife and I decided to make the long journey and go take a look to see if perhaps I was right with all of my “assumptions.”  We left for Gallup NM at 5:20 am on a Saturday morning.  We arrived at our hotel in Gallup at 6:15 pm local time with the sun scheduled to set at around 7:40 p.m.  I talked her into a quick trip out to the location since we were within a 30 minute drive and just take a quick look at the site.  I had no expectations of finding anything on this scouting trip.

When we got there, since I had what I thought was a location within just a few feet of where it was buried, I went ahead and climbed the mesa while my wife stayed at the base with phone and eye contact with me most of the time.  It didn’t take long to climb the mesa and then to reach the place I was searching for.  I had a new Garrett Ace 400 metal detector with me and I just set it on Zero-Disc mode since I was interested in anything metal where I was looking.

As I approached my search area I noticed a lot of trashy metal on top of the ground but when I reached the actual area there was none of significance.  I started in the most likely spot and found…nothing.  Uhoh, I thought.  I could be completely wrong and we wasted a lot of time and money to make the trip out.  As I arrived at this search location I had noticed a very similar looking area right behind me and thought I would check that as well.  I checked there, scanning carefully with the metal detector and found nothing.

I must admit, I was about to give up for the day and come back the next day since the sun was going down.  And then, and this is the truth, I looked down right beside where I was standing and saw an unusual grouping of 5 rocks.  I backed up and passed the detector head over them and it sounded out loud and clear with 94 showing on the indicator.  I went to pinpoint and the object was about 4 to 6 inches long.  HCB shows himself with PVC pipe in some of the other cache books and that was what I was expecting here as well.

I was puzzled at the short length but I already knew I was digging, no matter what.  I moved the rocks and then started digging with a small garden trowel I had brought for the occasion.  I dug about three or four inches down and hit something hard.  I figured it was a rock and started brushing the dirt aside.  What I saw prompted me to drop everything and I yelled at my wife “I FOUND IT!!” like a little kid finding a hidden toy.  I think she’s still laughing.  What I saw was glass and I could see two things clearly… coins and a piece of paper with something written on it. It turned out to be an old mason jar full of coins.

So there it was, seeing the light of day for the first time in three years and five months to the day.  The sun was actually past setting at this point and I needed to get down off the mesa quickly.  I finished digging it up, carefully filled the hole and replaced the stones.  I made it back to the truck safely, showed it quickly to my wife, and we headed back to our hotel room to take a look at what we had.

In the poor light of the room I counted 323 old coins.  Most of them, if not all, seem to be foreign coins from around the world.  Now that I am home I will take the time to catalogue the find and figure out what to do with it after that.

Just let me finish by saying that H. Charles has put together some great adventures for us if we are just bold enough to get over our fear and go and pursue them.  The places are real and the treasures are there waiting for us.  I put in lots of hours and days of research and thinking, making use of every tool I could find to come up with my final solution.  It was not easy, and I would venture to say it should not be easy.  The satisfaction of “mission accomplished” is beyond compare.  So everyone keep on looking and maybe we will cross trails on the hunt some day!

TxTH

Best of luck with all that you seek!  Always Treasure the Adventure!

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