Forrest Fenn, Who Enticed Thousands With Treasure Hunt, Dies at 90

Forrest Fenn, an eccentric New Mexico art dealer who enticed thousands to search for hidden treasure after he announced in a 2010 book that he had stashed a bronze chest filled with gold nuggets and jewels somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, died on Sept. 7 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by a grandson, Shiloh Old.

It came just three months after Mr. Fenn said someone had finally found the treasure chest, which held, by his estimate, $2 million worth of gold nuggets, sapphires, diamonds, pre-Columbian artifacts and other riches.

“It was under a canopy of stars in the lush, forested vegetation of the Rocky Mountains and had not moved from the spot where I hid it more than 10 years ago,” Mr. Fenn said on his website in June. He did not give the exact location.

“I do not know the person who found it, but the poem in my book led him to the precise spot,” he added. His self-published 2010 memoir, “The Thrill of the Chase,” provided clues to the chest’s location in the verses of a poem.

A man who did not want to be identified found the chest, confirming the discovery with a photograph of it, Mr. Fenn told the newspaper The Santa Fe New Mexican.

Mr. Fenn, a former Air Force combat pilot who grew up reading adventure stories about pirates, cowboys and Indians, decided to start the treasure hunt decades ago, after he learned that he had kidney cancer. He said he had originally planned to have his remains buried along with the riches.

But when he recovered from the cancer, he said, he ventured alone into the Rockies with precious items culled from his collection — “265 gold coins, hundreds of gold nuggets, hundreds of rubies, eight emeralds, two Ceylon sapphires, many diamonds, two ancient Chinese jade carvings, pre-Columbian gold bracelets and fetishes, and more.”

In “The Thrill of the Chase,” Mr. Fenn said the treasure was ensconced somewhere in the Rockies at 5,000 feet above sea level. One cryptic clue said to begin the hunt “where warm waters halt, and take it in the canyon down.”

Mr. Fenn said he had no other motivation for starting the hunt than to encourage families to “get off their couches.” And get off their couches they did.

In 2016, he estimated that more than 65,000 people had joined the quest for the cache, guided by nothing more than Mr. Fenn’s word and the clues in his enigmatic 24-verse poem. Several websites tracked the hunt.

Dal Neitzel, a retired documentary filmmaker, said he had searched for the treasure more than 90 times across New Mexico, Montana and Wyoming. He said he and Mr. Fenn became friends after exchanging emails about the hunt in 2011.

“I think most of the searchers were just giant kids at heart,” said Mr. Neitzel, who is 72. “What kid didn’t have a lot of fun pretending they were going to find a lost chest of gold that some pirate had hidden? It’s just an extension of your childhood. But instead of it being pretend, it was real. And that made it more fun for adults.”

Still, he said, the search wasn’t always “fun and games.” He noted that Mr. Fenn had borne “a lot of negativity” from people who accused him of perpetrating a hoax or endangering the lives of treasure hunters who were unprepared for dangerous treks in the Rockies.

At least two people died trying to follow Mr. Fenn’s clues, and the chief of the New Mexico State Police urged Mr. Fenn to call off the hunt in 2017.

Mr. Fenn did not end the quest, but he responded that the valuables were not in an area that an octogenarian would find hard to reach.

“He loved families, and he loved the idea of getting them out in the mountains and the open air, and his great joy was talking to the families that were seeking the treasure,” said Dorothy Massey, the owner of Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, who called Mr. Fenn a friend and a mentor. “That was the important thing to him.”

Ms. Massey said Mr. Fenn had given her store the publishing rights to “The Thrill of the Chase,” which drew so many explorers to Santa Fe that it had “quite an effect on the general economy of the city.”

Forrest Burke Fenn was born on Aug. 22, 1930, in Temple, Texas. He spent idyllic summers fishing in Yellowstone National Park and hunting for arrowheads with his father, a schoolteacher, and his football coach, both of whom were avid collectors. He found his first arrowhead when he was 9 and told The New York Times in 2017 that it was still “the most prized possession in my collection.”

“My father taught me to not dwell on the centerline, but to go out to the edge and see what was there,” he said. “That thought manifested itself in many ways in my later life.”

Mr. Fenn graduated from Temple High School in 1947 and studied at Temple Junior College before joining the Air Force in 1950. As a pilot in the Vietnam War, he flew 328 combat missions in 348 days and was shot down twice, in Vietnam and Laos, he said.

He later opened an art gallery in Santa Fe that attracted big-name buyers in the 1970s and ’80s. A 1986 profile in People magazine reported that former President Gerald R. Ford, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Robert Redford, Cher and Steve Martin were among the patrons, paying high prices for oil paintings and Native American art and artifacts.

Mr. Old, his grandson, said Fenn is survived by his wife, Peggy Fenn; his daughters, Zoe and Kelly; and seven grandchildren.

Mr. Fenn often struck a philosophical tone when asked about the treasure hunt, insisting that it was not about wealth but about adventure.

“My hidden treasure pulls families into the Rocky Mountains to search and hike and observe the raw nature that is there,” he told The Times in 2017. “They go home with a whole new perspective on what life is all about. In this troubled world, we need some of that.”

Jonah Engel Bromwich contributed reporting.