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In 2016, Jon Collins-Black set out in search of treasure hidden by the art dealer Forrest Fenn. He never found Fenn’s fortune, a pirate’s treasure chest of gold coins and jewels buried for a decade. But Collins-Black fell in love with the thrill of the pursuit.
“I had the experience of what it was like to try to solve clues, to go out in nature and get away from the cell phone and the TV and just be out searching for something,” he tells The Independent. “I realized just how enlivening that was.”
Fenn’s treasure was eventually found in 2020 somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, around the time the world went into lockdown during the Covid pandemic. Stuck at home, Collins-Black began to dream about creating his own treasure hunt, something that would pull people away from their screens and get them exploring the planet around them.
“We’re in a digital world and what I’ve put together is an analog adventure,” he says of his new book There’s Treasure Inside. “All you need is a book, some water and some shoes.”
The treasure Collins-Black has assembled far outstrips the cache of goodies Fenn created. Collins-Black commissioned five unique puzzle boxes, which have been scattered across the United States, four of similar sizes and then one larger box containing the lion’s share of the fortune.
Jon Collins-Black spent five years and $2 million of his own money creating ‘There’s Treasure Inside’ (There’s Treasure Inside)Not only was Collins-Black fascinated by treasure hunts, he had the means to pull together a truly spectacular collection of valuables. He made his fortune by selling a careers website that hit big during the 2008 banking crisis, then made some wise Bitcoin investments in 2013. “Because of the rise in cryptocurrency and the price of Bitcoin, my financial situation changed dramatically,” he explains. “So by, 2020, when I started this project, I definitely had the means to do it right.”
Inspired to create what he describes as a “Dungeons & Dragons dragon’s horde of gold and shiny objects,” Collins-Black first started buying gold bars and jewels before expanding his search to more idiosyncratic treasures he hopes will appeal across many generations of treasure seekers. There is a rare physical Casascius Bitcoin, a gold pendant designed by Picasso, a rare Pokemon card and a highly collectible Michael Jordan rookie basketball card. Of all the treasures he amassed, Collins-Black says one with a particularly powerful story is a gold Olympic medal from 1960 won by sprinter Wilma Rudolph. “She had polio as a child, and doctors thought she wouldn’t live, and then that she wouldn’t walk,” explains Collins-Black. “She wore a brace for years, and then wound up becoming the fastest woman in the world. It’s a crazy story.”
The largest of the five custom ‘There’s Treasure Inside’ boxes holds the lion’s share of the fortune (There’s Treasure Inside)While amassing his unique treasure trove, Collins-Black was also plotting where to hide the boxes and what clues he could plant in his book to guide treasure hunters to them. “I was thinking about clues for the entirety of the time I was working on the book,” he says. “There are clues in the book that are years old, and some that came just at the very end.”
Asked what advice he’d give to those hoping to find the boxes, he says a keen eye for detail will be essential to uncovering all the book’s secrets.
“The chapters in my book really talk about, and are thematically about, how to become a better treasure hunter,” he explains. “The instructions on how to solve the clues and find the treasure are really in the chapter themes themselves. So I just say: ‘Read the book,’ because everything in there is what you need. That’s all you need.”
As for why he poured so much of his own money and time into creating the treasure hunt, Collins-Black says he hoped to spark the imagination.
“At the end of the day, there’s value to the excitement and the joy of the experience,” he says. “That sounds like cliché but for me, when I was searching for Forrest Fenn’s treasure, it was the idea of it that was most exciting. If I had found the treasure it would have been euphoric, but I don’t know if it would have exceeded the total joy that I had just through the whole process of it.”
‘There’s Treasure Inside’ by Jon Collins-Black is available now
