Two Utah residents have been organizing a local treasure hunt for fours years running. And this year's hunt for a treasure chest containing $25,000 in cash was finally solved after 51 days—a record since the annual tradition started.
John Maxim and David Cline, friends who met through real estate, started the treasure hunt in Bountiful, Utah during the lockdown stage of the pandemic in 2020, when people were stuck inside their homes. Initially, they weren't sure if the hunt would take off, but after the first was solved in just four days, they knew they were onto something.
However, after last year's treasure hunt was solved after just eight days, they knew they had to step their game up. The pair began planning this year's hunt around Valentine's Day, composing a clue-laden, 12-line poem that took them roughly three months to complete. The hunt kicked off on May 26, and in addition to the poem Maxim and Cline released new clues every Friday.
Interestingly enough, this year's winner, Chelsea Gotta, wasn't even from Utah. She made the 16-hour drive from Pella, IA to participate. It was Gotta's third time attempting to find the treasure. She's the first out of state winner, after coming with her family for the first trip and flying in the second. She was just about to give up when she finally found the treasure chest obscured under heaps of pine cone dust at the base of a tree off the city's Mueller Park Trail.
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Gotta put together most of the clues back home before making her latest journey. However, she had a feeling she was close after zooming out from Mueller Park Trail on Google Maps and noticing an upside down church steeple formation that she believed was a reference to the line in the poem, "What points toward heaven but is upside down."
She kept getting closer and closer until setting her sights on a clearing about 60 feet off the shoulder of the trail. Eventually, she found the X that marked the spot. "My time was running out. I was getting frustrated, I was crying," Gotta told Utah's KSL News. "I'm like 'I've wasted all this time. This is ridiculous. What am I doing?'"
"Everybody at work thinks I'm crazy, everybody at home thinks I'm crazy," she added. "I just started texting people from work, 'I told you.'"
Gotta first caught wind of the treasure hunt on Facebook and decided to make the trip after she couldn't stop thinking about it. Now, she plans to use the bulk of her winnings to organize a similar hunt in her own hometown. Before making the drive back to Iowa in time for work on Tuesday, she was hoping to find a family with three boys who helped her search on a previous trip to share $200 with them.
"It's just in my heart to do it," Gotta said.
As for Cline and Maxim, they now have sponsors and a public relations specialist, and have even started organizing treasure trips all over the world due to the overwhelming demand. They already have upcoming hunts planned in Zion National Park in August and Costa Rica in January. When Cline originally came up with the idea in 2020, he enlisted the help of Maxim, who had grown up watching movies such as Goonies and Indiana Jones.
"'That's the greatest idea I've ever heard,' I think were my exact words," Maxim said. It seems safe to say that thousands of amateur treasure hunters agree.
from Men's Journal https://ift.tt/76hBL8A
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