Somewhere in San Francisco, buried one foot underground, rests a treasure chest filled with $1 coins — 10,000 of them, so many that the booty weighs 150 pounds.
In this city of exorbitant wealth, where a modest home can top $2 million, $10,000 is not life-changing. It might pay two or three months of rent. And who really wants to haul that many coins to the bank?
Nevertheless, people armed with shovels and maps fanned out across San Francisco this week determined to find the loot. In this high-tech city, the center of the artificial intelligence boom that could upend society, an old-timey adventure that required getting outside and digging in the dirt proved irresistible.
The quest began Wednesday morning on a bustling San Francisco Reddit page. A post announced that a treasure chest with $10,000 had been buried and offered a poem with clues to its location.
“Minute steps climb, and beyond fingers rise, onward on pins where the treasure lies,” the poem began, only getting more cryptic from there.
Baxter Zrob, 16, was sitting in his high school history class when his dad texted him a link to the hunt with two words: “It’s on!”
Soon, he had skipped school and was at the old U.S. Mint building at Fifth and Mission Streets, squirreling through a hole in the wrought iron fence and digging in the garden area. But a barefoot woman injecting herself with a hypodermic needle on the steps yelled that he was causing a disturbance, and he reconsidered.
Scrapping the clue about “the mint,” he instead landed on the words “heavenly island.” Maybe, he said, the chest was buried at Angel Island. He was off to the Ferry Building to catch a boat.
From the gold seekers of 1849 to the dot-com entrepreneurs of the 1990s and 2000s to the A.I. masterminds of today, San Francisco has always been a place where enterprising people seek their riches.
And treasure hunts have long been part of the city’s lore. Back in 1953, The San Francisco Chronicle launched the Emperor Norton Treasure Hunt — named for an eccentric city resident who, in 1859, declared himself “Norton 1, Emperor of the United States” and saw whimsical San Franciscans embrace him as their leader with a knowing wink.
For several years, the newspaper hosted the hunt, burying a medallion and printing clues until it was found. The medallion could be turned in at The Chronicle’s headquarters for $1,000.
More recent contests have included the Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt, run by a private detective annually since 1989 at the same time as the Lunar New Year Parade. A local coin shop has also hosted three hunts in which people look for rare coins.
The newest quest is being staged by two men who put together a similar treasure hunt last year.
They insisted that their identity remain secret because it added to the mystique. This much was wrested out of them, though: They are friends in their 30s who live on the west side of San Francisco and do not work in the tech sector. They cannot afford to bury any more money, they said. Unless a wealthy benefactor coughs up a chest full of cash, this is their final hunt.
Their first hunt was also announced on Reddit, garnering a slew of local media coverage as treasure seekers played hooky to try to decipher clues that turned out to represent four points around the city. Connecting the four points on a map made an X.
X did indeed mark the spot, where an aluminum case filled with money, gold nuggets and baseball cards was buried. The location was a little clearing atop Mt. Sutro, a forested area just south of Golden Gate Park.
The creators thought they had constructed an exceedingly difficult challenge, but they had not. The chest was dug up in just 11 hours by a team of three people and one very excited dog.
T.J. Lee, one of the winners in last year’s quest, said that while the rest of the city seemed to be “torturing ChatGPT” with the clues, looking for insights, her team realized that this was not something a chatbot could solve and simply required clever thinking.
She said a Gold Rush boomtown that is filled with nerdy engineers who love logic puzzles and that is teeming with parks and open spaces where people can dig makes the perfect place for a treasure hunt.
It also helps that people in San Francisco like to stand out and be a little weird — and ditching work to spend a weekday hunting for treasure certainly qualifies.
“We have a lot of people who think of themselves as not like the other boys and girls,” Ms. Lee said. “If that’s your thinking, that I am the main character, I’m not one of the normies, you want to do something special.”
Ms. Lee was so tickled by last year’s treasure hunt that she decided to use the chest to bury her own treasure and host a new hunt, unveiling it in September.
She sought donated gift cards and coupons for classes from small businesses around the city, collecting $21,000 worth of rewards. Her clues were woven into a long poem called “A Love Letter to San Francisco.” Her hunt required people to realize that each stanza pointed to a place where copper tacks were stuck into objects, and that the tacks included numbers that pointed to longitude and latitude coordinates.
YuYu Schatz and Jed Lau, neighbors in the Duboce Triangle neighborhood, teamed up and spent more than two weeks scouring the city to find the treasure Ms. Lee hid. They barely ate, slept or saw their families.
“The compulsion took over us,” said Ms. Schatz, 35, a product designer at Stripe. “I was shovel-ready at all times, ready to dig.”
When they finally hit metal at Buena Vista Park in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, Ms. Schatz said she let out a huge yell.
“It was exhilarating. The first thing I said to Jed was, ‘We can finally sleep!’” she said. “We came out of it as family. I started calling him ‘Unc.’ We’re bonded for life.”
They learned they had been up against teams from the city’s biggest A.I. companies. But like Ms. Lee, Ms. Schatz said that such puzzles were better solved by humans who know a lot about the city.
The pair who had buried the chest a year ago emailed Ms. Schatz from an anonymous account asking if they could have it back for one last hunt, sending a courier to pick it up so they could keep their identities hidden. They then made six trips to banks to withdraw 10,000 one-dollar coins, and devised a new set of clues.
They buried the chest several months ago, but waited to announce the hunt until Wednesday, when the weather was lovely and their schedules were clear. Soon, people were digging at Aquatic Park on the northern waterfront, near Coit Tower, at the Filbert steps scaling Telegraph Hill, and at Stern Grove on the western side of the city.
Baxter was not the only person carrying a big shovel to ride the ferry to Angel Island, but he was the only one to bring a bicycle, and he zoomed off as soon as the gangplank was in place.
Hours later, on the ferry back to the city, he said he had scoured multiple sites, but had come up empty. He was not deterred.
His dad, Jeff Odell, a production software manager at Lucasfilm, texted Baxter ideas about the clues throughout the day. Mr. Odell said in an interview that he planned to join his son in the hunt when his work schedule allowed. In the meantime, he had created a Google doc for clue analysis.
“I’m like his treasure hunt secretary,” Mr. Odell said. “He wants to go and do it, and I want to study and reflect.”
Baxter said he would keep hunting until the chest was found.
He said his favorite things include old coins, adventure stories like “Indiana Jones” and moments when his phone runs out of juice and nobody can find him.
“It’s the thrill of the chase,” he said of a good hunt. “Maybe the real treasure is the fun you accumulate along the way.”
Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.
The post The Race Is On to Find the Treasure Buried in San Francisco appeared first on New York Times.
