Buried Treasure In New Mexico?

When I get tired of looking for "Breaking Bad" filming locations, there is Forrest Fenn's buried treasure:

Last summer, I profiled Forrest Fenn, the quixotic author of The Thrill of the Chase, who walked me through his decision to secret a chest of gold, jewels, and precious artifacts into the mountains “north of Santa Fe.” He peppered his memoir with clues to the location—including coded directions in a 24-line poem that ends: “So hear me all and listen good,/Your effort will be worth the cold./If you are brave and in the wood/I give you title to the gold.”

...This week Fenn appeared on The Today Show, and NBC Nightly News touting the treasure hunt, and reigniting the search for his gold. The appearance set off a Fenn frenzy, crashing his personal website and creating a run on his book, which until now had been a marginalized curiosity, sold through a single independent book store in Santa Fe. As of this writing, Amazon listed one copy left for sale, $45, and other sites advertised “used” volumes for three times as much. Fenn himself has gone back for a new printing.

...His memoir is a drifty, disorganized thing. One imagines him dropping the pages on the way to the printer, losing a few in the wind, and binding the rest in whatever order he picked them up. But it doesn’t matter. What makes this treasure scheme so exciting—and so unnerving for some—is the figure of Fenn himself: a man who may be America’s last great collector, an amateur digger and self-taught everything, smarter than the average archeologist, savvier than a rude tomb-raider, and more aggressive than both.

...Those two points combined—the rebelliousness, the love of antiquities—point toward a hiding place on public land, where the ground is lumpy with centuries of human debris. The Thrill of the Chase is about giving a hands-on experience to the public-at-large. You could say Fenn’s whole life is about that ethos. He built the thrill into his gallery—housing 19th-century landscape paintings priced higher than some state lotto jackpots—and his home, where I ran my finger over the lip of six perfect pre-Columbian pots and felt the point of an 800-year-old needle and a mescal knife for eating cactus. “Please touch,” he said emphatically. “I am responsible.”