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A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

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Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#61

Post by walrus01 »

Phlarp wrote: post #48
walrus01 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Mark the location by GPS coordinates, write it down in a few safe places, get back to civilization and make a plan 2) Hike out the hoard in several batches 3) If you are a particularly paranoid sort of person, unless the coins are worth significantly more by their rarity value, buy a $2000 furnace and crucible and melt them down into bars. Sell the bars at a slight loss below the value of 99.999% purity.

This is not how physical gold works. My understanding is that it's tightly regulated with unique identifiers for all ingots, bars, etc and the ownership of each being recorded so there is an audit trail if a diluted bar or ingot is found later. I assume freshly mined gold has to go through some type of formal lab validation / certification for purity that puts it into this identification scheme. I expect nobody will…

You absolutely can sell unmarked gold, but at a lower price than, for example, Canadian mint gold coins. You may need to pay for an assay to prove its purity.

Edit: Google "gold scrap refining", it is not an uncommon thing.

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#63

Post by gamblor956 »

nylonstrung wrote: post #54
Phlarp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how physical gold works. My understanding is that it's tightly regulated with unique identifiers for all ingots, bars, etc and the ownership of each being recorded so there is an audit trail if a diluted bar or ingot is found later. I assume freshly mined gold has to go through some type of formal lab validation / certification for purity that puts it into this identification scheme. I expect nobody will…

You could melt it down into rudimentary jewelry and then perhaps sell that to gold buyers, who don't have to report <$10K transactions to the IRS

Transactions above $600 are reported to the IRS on form 1099 MISC.

You're thinking of the bank account deposit reporting threshold.

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#64

Post by rhklein »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #17

Reminds me of Kit William's "Masquerade". I remember his coffee-table book that kicked off a treasure hunt in the '70's. I later read with fascination how the treasure hunt was planned, executed, and finally solved. The party that solved the puzzle did not in fact find the golden hare — instead an individual who had not solved it did. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1176887.Quest_for_the_Go... We need more hidden…

Here is quick video summary about the "Masquerade" puzzle. The solution seems quite arbitrary. (drawing a line over left eye and hand without knowing the exact point can lead to quite different letters.) https://youtu.be/3yaHBdhIsCo The Rocky mountains treasure is also mentioned.

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#66

Post by drzaiusapelord »

markbnj wrote: post #11

Interesting to consider what you would do if you found it? Presumably you're in the wilderness with a 40 pound chest. Your car might be fairly near, as Fenn makes clear when he notes he was 80 when he made "two trips from my vehicle" to the site. So if you're fit or have help you can probably get it back to the car (40 pounds is a lot to carry in hiking terrain). What happens once you do? How do you claim title to it…

Also, security. If you were a local you might think of beating up the tired guy coming out of the woods with a big heavy box. You'd have to have other people there to provide security at the least.

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#67

Post by pavel_lishin »

DanBC wrote: post #58
cryptoz wrote: post #6

> all artefacts that Fenn, a self-taught archaeologist, amassed during his own sometimes controversial explorations in the Southwest, reports Vox. The millionaire was criticised in the 1990s for excavating the San Lazaro Pueblo Indian site he bought, for example, and the FBI searched his home in 2009 in connection with the sale of artefacts looted from the Four Corners area, though no charges were filed. It sounds li…

It's a shame you got downvoted. I was interested in this article because I hadn't realsied before the controversy around his aquiring of the treasure.

If there's controversy there, that definitely needs to make it into articles about this treasure. Maybe whoever finds it will be an Indiana Jones type - "It belongs in a museum!"

Re: A US millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue

#68

Post by 8bitsrule »

markbnj wrote: post #11

Interesting to consider what you would do if you found it? Presumably you're in the wilderness with a 40 pound chest. Your car might be fairly near, as Fenn makes clear when he notes he was 80 when he made "two trips from my vehicle" to the site. So if you're fit or have help you can probably get it back to the car (40 pounds is a lot to carry in hiking terrain). What happens once you do? How do you claim title to it…

Emulate the 'Saddle Ridge Hoard' couple. They were smart about it when they found those 8 cans in Gold Country. They picked out a firm of coin experts (Kagin's) to represent them, and to stay anonymous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_Ridge_Hoard

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