Treasure Hunting! Is It Better to Search Using a Poem or a Metal Detector? What is the Point of Seeking Treasure?

<p>The Best Paragraph I've Read:</p> <p><br></p> <p>"When Justin Posey was 11, he became obsessed with the Victorio Peak treasure, a hoard of perhaps thousands of gold bars supposedly found by a hunter named Milton Noss in a hilltop cavern in New Mexico in 1937. Before Noss was able to recover most of the gold he had seen, the shaft leading to it caved in; after World War II, the U.S. government seized the whole area, adding it to the White Sands Missile Range. “This concept that there could be, around the corner, a vast fortune with an unimaginable historical context was just enthralling,” Posey says. He learned everything he could about it, even attending a summit held by descendants of Noss. He joined tours of the missile range, cooking up schemes to peel off from the group and sneak away to the treasure site. “That was the agonizing part,” he recalls. “I felt I could do this, but the physical barriers made it all the worse. It consumed the majority of my childhood.”</p> <p>Years later, in 2012, when Posey was 29, his wife, Jennie, emailed him a <em>Newsweek</em>article about a different treasure. Hidden in “the mountains north of Santa Fe,” the treasure sounded almost fantastical — diamonds, rubies, and sapphires; gold coins, gold nuggets, a 17th-century Spanish ring. The key to finding the treasure lay in a 24-line poem in a self-published memoir, <em>The Thrill of the Chase</em>, by Forrest Fenn, the wealthy 82-year-old eccentric who had hidden it. Fenn, who estimated the treasure to be worth more than $1 million, said he hid it to motivate people to put down their digital devices and get out into nature. He was still alive and willing to engage with searchers. The hunt was free; the purse was big. The poem’s puzzle could theoretically be solved by anyone."</p> <p><br></p> <p>This paragraph comes from an article in New York Magazine titled: "The Great 21st Century Treasure Hunt." &nbsp;The article is written by Benjamin Wallace. &nbsp;The article can be read here:</p> <p><br></p> <p><a href="https://nymag.c