After learning about Forrest Fenn's $2 million hidden treasure, Michigan medical student Jack Stuef spent two years searching — and finally found it in Wyoming in 2020.
Jack StuefJack Stuef, the man who found Forrest Fenn’s treasure.
For about a decade, treasure hunters everywhere searched feverishly for buried treasure in the Rocky Mountains. It had been hidden by Forrest Fenn, an art collector who had been inspired to start the treasure hunt by his brush with cancer. In June 2020, Fenn announced that the treasure had been found. And that December, the finder revealed himself, writing: “My name is Jack Stuef and I am the finder of the Forrest Fenn Treasure.”
Naturally, treasure hunters who had spent years looking for the Forrest Fenn Treasure had questions. Who was Jack Stuef? How had he managed to succeed where they failed? Was it possible that he’d had help from Fenn? And where exactly was the elusive treasure buried?
Since admitting that he found the treasure, Jack Stuef has been fairly recalcitrant. And, to the frustration of some treasure hunters, he’s the only one who has any definitive answers, since Fenn died in September 2020.
This is everything we know about Jack Stuef, whose story is featured in the Netflix docuseries Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure.
The 32-Year-Old Medical Student Who Embarked On A Treasure Hunt
Jack StuefJack Stuef with Forrest Fenn, shortly after the discovery of the treasure.
Before he was a treasure hunter, Stuef was a medical student — but medical school hadn’t always been his plan. According to an interview he conducted with Outside’s Daniel Barbarisi in December 2020, Stuef had been interested in treasure hunts as a teenager but focused more on comedy writing when he attended Georgetown University as a young adult.
Following his graduation in December 2009, Stuef started a career as a writer. But he faced a few minor controversies early in his career — he wrote a Buzzfeed article about cartoonist Matthew Inman, who claimed Stuef’s article was “so blatantly wrong it borders on being libelous,” and made a poorly received joke about one of Sarah Palin’s children — that seemed to make Stuef reconsider his career path.
After leaving his career in media, Jack Stuef enrolled in medical school. He didn’t especially enjoy his studies, and in 2018, Stuef caught wind of something he found much more fascinating. While scrolling through Twitter, Stuef discovered Forrest Fenn’s treasure hunt.
How it had eluded him for eight full years was a mystery, but once Stuef knew about it he became obsessed. Indeed, Jack Stuef was far from the only person to be enchanted by Forrest Fenn’s treasure.
Forrest Fenn’s Decade-Long Treasure Hunt
After being diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1988, treasure hunter and art collector Forrest Fenn began to reflect on his legacy. Throughout the years, he had amassed a trove of valuables from excavations and digs, but now, staring death in the face, he wondered what it was all for.
Ultimately, his diagnosis had a profound effect on his legacy. It prompted him to purchase a 12th-century Romanesque box, measuring 10 inches by 10 inches, and pack it with valuable artifacts and a copy of his autobiography. His plan was to take it into the mountains with him and die beside it.
But Fenn beat cancer, and the box remained untouched until 2010. At that point, Fenn announced that he would be hiding the treasure — and that a poem in his memoir provided all the clues necessary to find it. Thus began the search for the Forrest Fenn Treasure.
The treasure hunt would draw some 300,000 people — and result in at least five deaths. Despite the clues Fenn had provided, however, no one could unravel his riddle and find his buried treasure.
But once Jack Stuef learned about the treasure hunt in 2018, it didn’t take him long to start cracking Forrest Fenn’s code.
Jack Stuef Finds Forrest Fenn’s Treasure
Surprisingly, Jack Stuef figured out where Forrest Fenn’s treasure was located shortly after learning about the treasure hunt. As he told Barbarisi, he educated himself about treasure hunts, devoured Fenn’s memoir, The Thrill of the Chase, and obsessively mined Fenn’s interviews for clues.
“I think I got a little embarrassed by how obsessed I was with it,” Stuef told Barbarisi. “If I didn’t find it, I would look kind of like an idiot. And maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself what a hold it had on me.”
But Stuef’s obsession helped him see something that no one else had. And in 2020, Stuef took his hunch to the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming to see if he could find the Forrest Fenn Treasure at long last.
Jack StuefStuef’s hiking pack and the IKEA bag he carried the treasure back in.
“I figured out the location where he wished to die (and thus, where his treasure was) back in 2018,” Stuef wrote in a Medium post, which was initially anonymous, in September 2020, “but it took me many months to figure out the exact spot. This treasure hunt was the most frustrating experience of my life… I spent about 25 full days of failure looking for the treasure at that location before getting it.”
But thrillingly, Jack Stuef “got” Forrest Fenn’s treasure on June 6, 2020. The Fenn family independently verified that Stuef had indeed found the treasure, and Stuef met and spoke with Fenn shortly after.
“The guy who found it does not want his name mentioned,” Fenn said when he announced that his treasure had been found, respecting Stuef’s wishes to remain anonymous. “He’s from back East.”
Sadly, Forrest Fenn died died two months later, on Sept. 7, 2020. And Jack Stuef wasn’t able to stay anonymous for very long.
Why Jack Stuef Was Forced To Reveal His Identity
Jack StuefForrest Fenn, the collector who hid his treasure in 2010.
It made sense why Jack Stuef initially wanted to remain anonymous. Ever since announcing the treasure hunt, Forrest Fenn and his family had been harassed by harried treasure hunters — one of whom attempted to break into his home. What’s more, treasure hunters had been looking for the treasure for a decade, and many were disheartened, or even angry, that a man from “back East” had succeeded where they failed.
At first, it seemed that Stuef might be able to stay out of the spotlight. Even Barbarisi, who began to speak to him via email, didn’t know his name. But both Fenn and Stuef began to be targeted by lawsuits filed by people who claimed that the treasure was rightfully theirs, or that Stuef had somehow cheated to find it. Fenn died in September, but it seemed clear that the “finder” of his treasure would be named in court.
So, Stuef decided to reveal himself.
In a Medium post on December 7, 2020, Stuef revealed his name and explained why he had wanted to stay anonymous.
“For the past six months, I have remained anonymous, not because I have anything to hide, but because Forrest and his family endured stalkers, death threats, home invasions, frivolous lawsuits, and a potential kidnapping — all at the hands of people with delusions related to his treasure,” Stuef wrote. “I don’t want those things to happen to me and my family.”
He understood, Stuef wrote, that finding the treasure “ended the hopes of the many people around the world who wanted to one day find it” but he affirmed that “I am not and was never employed by Forrest, nor did he ‘pick’ me in any way to ‘retrieve’ the treasure. I was a stranger to him and found the treasure as he designed it to be found.”
So what exactly did the lawsuits against Stuef and Fenn claim?
Controversies And Legal Issues Surrounding Forrest Fenn’s Treasure
To those who sued Stuef and Fenn, there were several suspicious elements of the story. Stuef’s Medium account was anonymous, for example, and Stuef refused to disclose the exact location of the treasure (though he shared that he’d found it somewhere in the mountains of Wyoming.)
In 2020, he was sued by Barbara Andersen, a Chicago real estate attorney. Andersen alleged that Stuef — though, in the suit, she did not use his name as she didn’t know it — had been able to find the treasure only by hacking her texts and emails. She claimed that the treasure should have rightfully been hers, and would have been if not for this thievery.
Jack StuefSome of the items from the Forrest Fenn Treasure.
Barbara Andersen also erroneously believed, however, that Fenn’s treasure was in New Mexico.
In 2021, a French treasure hunter named Bruno Raphoz also sued Fenn. Raphoz claimed that he had solved Fenn’s riddle, but that Fenn had moved the treasure before he could find it. Raphoz more or less also accused Stuef of being a red herring, so that Fenn could take the treasure himself.
“It appeared suspicious to everyone,” Raphoz claimed in his lawsuit. “Our assumption is that Fenn went to retrieve the chest himself, declared it found publicly, and kept the content for himself.”
But ultimately, these lawsuits didn’t change the fact of the case — Jack Stuef had found Forrest Fenn’s treasure. After pouring over Fenn’s words and statements, he saw something that no one else had.
Jack Stuef On Forrest Fenn And His Treasure
Ultimately, Jack Stuef said the key to finding the Forrest Fenn Treasure wasn’t in some complex code, riddle, or cipher. It all came down to understanding Fenn and a close reading of Fenn’s poem.
Jack StuefForrest Fenn was protective of the treasure’s location.
“I mean, that’s what it is,” he said. “It’s having the correct interpretation of a poem. I understood him by reading his words, and listening to him talk over and over and over and over again. And seeking out anything I could get my hands on that told me who he was.”
As for why he refused to give up the location, Stuef said it was to preserve the specialness of that location and avoid it turning into a tourist attraction — as Fenn would have wanted: “We thought it was not appropriate for that to happen. He was willing to go to great lengths, very great lengths, to avoid ever having to tell the location.”
Though Stuef wasn’t sure at first if he’d keep the treasure, he ultimately decided to sell it. Fenn even linked him up with potential buyers before he died and, in a November 2022 update on Medium, Stuef announced that he had indeed sold the treasure in a private transaction.
But it’s clear that Jack Stuef found more than treasure during his quest. He also found a spiritual soulmate in Forrest Fenn.
“Forrest didn’t make it back to his special place in his final hour,” Jack Stuef wrote. “But when I go back some day to lie down beneath those towering pines, tilt my hat over my face to shield against the bright sun, and drift off into one more afternoon nap in that serene forest in the wilds of the Cowboy State, I know he will be resting there next to me.”
After reading about how Jack Stuef finally found Forrest Fenn’s treasure, read about how Tommy Thompson allegedly found $4 million in gold — and why he refuses to give up its location. Then, read about the mystery of the Oak Island treasure.
