A renewed treasure hunt

A long time ago in the early 2000's when I was 25 years younger I received a book from my grandma that was a real life treasure hunt - that book was "A Treasure's Trove" and I wrote a blog about that journey in detail. Like I hinted at in my last blog: "Hobbies are amazing" there is a new treasure book in my hand that I've been researching.

This book (There's Treasure Inside) was released in October/November of 2024 and as of this post none of the treasures inside have been discovered. So there are two ways to look at this.

1. Take this at truth value and no one in almost a year have discovered anything.
2. Treasures have been found and not revealed to entice further book purchase or the author was not made aware of the find(s).

So I thought I could use a break from other normal hobby projects and decided to read this book start to finish and attempt to solve it. I thought it was crazy that on July 7, 2025 I hadn't read a single page of the book and by July 9, 2025 I had read the entire book once notating all my research in a private GitHub repository.

This was an interesting book as it was basically written explaining all the treasure items inside the treasure boxes with interjections of history and personal anecdotes. The entire first part of the book was for the big "Lion's Share" treasure which took up nearly 200 pages of potential clues. The 2nd part of the book was 4 sections each dedicated to their own treasure in isolated chapters.

Broken down in a more visual bullet points would be:

• Part One
  • Lion's Share
• Part Two
  • The Forrest Fenn Box
  • The Pokémon Box
  • The Past and Future Box
  • The Appalachian Footpath Box

Some of these boxes like the Forrest Fenn Box are announced to be in the Rocky Mountains while others like the Appalachian Footpath hint at being on the Appalachian trail. The other boxes are up to the reader to determine the area where the treasure might reside.

So with a bit of confirmed knowledge of the search area of some boxes I eliminated a box or two I didn't really care to research. Leaving me with Lion's Share, Pokemon or Past and Future box to choose from. While looking at those I realized a literary puzzle is not very fun to me - I prefer ciphers and puzzles. Only one puzzle was even close to that and that was the Past and Future box.

I'm 10~ months behind on research compared to others and starting a puzzle myself. I tried to avoid any public research because much like I discovered in Cicada 3301 puzzles you can get so attached to what the general public path thinks you lose focus on any other possibility so I went in blind.

I worked on my own on a word search - developing a little tool to help me mark, adapt, anagram, replace and tweak a dynamic grid. This was fun because building any tooling to help solve a puzzle is fun, especially when you try out this new craze of "vibe coding". In this journey of building features to this tool for rotation, grouping, removals, anagrams I stumbled upon a group of terms that looked interesting.

I did a Google search of the terms and got a hit and zoomed in on Google to the location. To my surprise another term in the word search was showing on my map - so I had a few more matching clues so now I was convinced I might have something.

I went off to Reddit and the Internet to look for public research and most of the public research for this box was in a completely different state than I was looking. So I felt conflicted that I was either completely off base with confirmation bias or going in a direction different than the public.

So I decided to book a plane ticket and next weekend I'm going treasure hunting. I think back to how the original Fenn Treasure remained unsolved for a decade despite only a little poem containing the secret. It much like this puzzle was mainly a literary based solve with interpretation leading the way. So from that thought process its immune to the rising power of AI - there is no grand cipher or coordinate pair awaiting you.

For that reason I think its cool and fun to spend a weekend exploring nature and seeing a bit more of the United States. I'll look for Ingress portals and treasure on my journey and the next blog will have some great stories regardless of the success.