An inveterate raconteur with an infectious chuckle, Fenn was a familiar face in Santa Fe, where he’d lived with his wife, Peggy, since the Seventies. In 1988, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer and the prognosis was grim: he figured he had about a year to live, and that’s when Fenn started to formulate a plan to bury some of the treasure he’d acquired over the years, leaving clues to its whereabouts. “It had been so much fun building my collection over the decades,” he later wrote, “why not let others come searching for some of it while I’m still here?” In the event, it took him more than 20 years to go through with the plan, by which time his cancer was long-gone. In 2010 he self-published a book, The Thrill of the Chase, a memoir packed with clues and a poem leading to the treasure chest. “There must be a few Indiana Jones types out there, like me, ready to throw a bedroll in the pickup and start searching,” he wrote.