If you learned there was buried treasure in your city, would you drop everything and go look for it? That's what some people in San Francisco did on Tuesday after a two-person team posted clues on Reddit leading to a chest that the team said was "brimming with gleaming ingots, currency and San Francisco artifacts."
The post quickly went viral. Within a few hours it had elicited hundreds of comments from enthusiasts ("I love a good San Francisco mystery") and skeptics ("Inside you will find only a pair of tickets to Shen Yun") alike.
Those who went in search of the chest armed with shovels included friends Eamon McLoughlin, Sean Rapin, Cian O'Dwyer and Luke Howard.
"We were all hanging out about an hour ago, and I literally said, 'Guys, check this out,'" said Howard. "And then we just jumped in the car."
The clues led the friends, as well as a lot of other people on Reddit, to Sutro Baths, a historic swimming pool complex on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
The four friends worked hard to make sense of the clues. At one point, they split up and went in different directions.
They enjoy solving puzzles. But, like many others on Reddit, they also asked an AI model (in their case, Google Gemini) for a little assist.
"We plugged it in just to see what it spat out," said McLoughlin. "But it just confirmed our theory."
Yet after an hour or so of poking around, they decided to continue the search in Golden Gate Park.
They said finding the treasure would be great. But they were more interested in being out together on an adventure.
" It's kind of old San Francisco with the weird quirkiness," McLoughlin said. " But people giving away money — that's kind of new San Francisco."
In San Francisco, treasure hunts are a thing
Treasure hunts are popular in San Francisco, as are whimsical giveaways. There was the "Emperor Norton" Treasure Hunts for a golden medallion in the 1950s and '60s and "The Secret" treasure hunt a few years ago, which focused on finding hidden jewels hidden in various cities, including San Francisco. As for giveaways, an anonymous software engineer recently set up a $50,000 fund.
The people behind this latest treasure hunt also wished to remain anonymous because, as they say, "whimsy and adventure and mischief and hijinks does live in a sort of legal gray area."
They added in an email, "There's also some concern about stalkers and harassment. The thirst for treasure and gold can bring out some strange behavior."
In a phone interview, the pair added that they are not wealthy and do not work in the tech sector.
"It was a non-insignificant amount of savings," one of them said, adding that they were inspired both by treasure-seeking movie narratives like The Goonies and Raiders of the Lost Ark, as well as the real-life story of art dealer Forrest Fenn, who hid a $2 million treasure in the Rocky Mountains in 2010.
"It comes from a place of really wanting to do this. And if we could afford a hundred thousand dollars or a million, we would. Ten thousand dollars felt like the bare minimum entry to say: This is treasure. This is compelling. There's really something out there that's worth pursuing."
The organizers said they spent months preparing the treasure hunt. So when, less than 12 hours after the original Reddit post went up, a team of three declared victory, they were flummoxed.
"Welp, didn't expect this so quickly!" they said.
Super sleuths Austin Theriault, TJ Lee and Erik Bahri said they found the treasure on Tuesday evening after just over an hour of searching.
In a phone interview with NPR, they said they all have jobs in tech. But they knew better than to trust the puzzle-solving skills of AI. When so many people started posting AI answers to the clues, " It actually strengthened our take on Sutro Baths not being a place to look," Bahri said.
Theriault said they went back and forth about the clues all day at work relying on their knowledge of the city, their intuition and their smarts to decipher the clues. A well-crafted National Park Service map also provided valuable assistance.
" We figured that the reference to Sutro Baths was probably a red herring, both because it's too difficult to conceal digging and it's also too highly trafficked," said Lee, explaining how they figured out some of the clues. "Also, it's not very dark. One of the clues is that it's preserved 'in a clearing, sight of dark room's view,' and that you had to 'pack a light,' which indicated to us that it was almost definitely going to be in a park — because anywhere else in the city you'll have street light."
Lee, Bahri and Theriault — along with Theriault's dog, Franz — headed instead to West Ridge Trail in Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve. They dug around and eventually found the prize buried under a bush near a hiking trail intersection — more than five miles away from Sutro Baths.
" It's validating to be like, 'I know San Francisco well enough' that we were able to find this in the first spot we checked," said Theriault of the treasure, which includes a big gold nugget in a corked bottle with sand in it, gold francs, a Panama Pacific Exposition bronze coin and three collectible Barry Bonds baseball cards, among other finds.
" The organizers did this as a bit of a love letter to the city," said Lee. "And so it's gratifying to know, at least for me, that someone who loves the city as much as the organizers was able to find the treasure."
For their part, the organizers told NPR they'd like to do more treasure hunts around the city — if a wealthy donor is willing to step up.
Jennifer Vanasco edited this story for air and web. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.
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