San Francisco feels blissfully boring at the moment. Crime is down, the weather is great, and we have $25 hot dogs. Life is good, but God, is it dull.
Lucky for us, some anonymous pals brought intrigue to our lives with a local mystery: ten grand worth of stuff you could easily sell, hidden in a chest under the very ground on which you walk.
“We buried a $10,000 treasure chest somewhere in San Francisco,” said a Reddit post uploaded Tuesday. On their website, the booty planters described a “22-pound chest … brimming with gleaming ingots, currency, and San Francisco artifacts.” The site said the chest held about $5,000 worth of gold.
To find the treasure, hunters would have to solve a series of riddles based on identifying local landmarks.
Hoping we could strike it rich, or at least get a headline out of it, The Standard ventured out at once to find the loot. A visit to Golden Gate Park’s Prayerbook Cross (perhaps the historic cross mentioned in the clues?) proved fruitless. But at Sutro Baths, we stumbled upon a handful of swashbuckling plunderers — er, remote workers — seeking the hidden trove.
“A lot of the clues indicated that it would be around here,” said treasure hunter Sean Donovan. The dry ruins, he surmised, were those of Sutro Baths, and “solar’s tall mast” was the Mile Rocks Lighthouse.
Donovan, a climate policy professional, said he does not often dig for treasure but is a keen observer and collector of unloved objects.
“Yesterday I found a carabiner, for instance,” he said. He added that he and his Burning Man friends collect items for a project called the MOOP (Matter out of Place) Museum.
Donovan explained that he was able to hit the trail mere hours after learning of the treasure, due to federal grant cuts. His nonprofit employer recently lost funding, he said, leading it to cut his hours. If he found the treasure, it would help him pay the rent.
As he spoke, a resplendent red-tailed hawk swooped above, a mouse in its talons.
“He found his treasure,” said Donovan.
Reached by email, the clue-masters said they cobbled the treasure together for this project over the course of five years and buried the chest five weeks ago. They were reluctant to share details about themselves.
“This is a guerrilla action, and I’m not inclined to speak too much to the who, the where, and the why,” one said. “We did some of the burying at night and some of the site preparation during the day. … There is a minor amount of mischief involved.”
We were on the verge of leaving Sutro Baths when a voice inquired from above: “Did you find it?”
The voice belonged to lighting director Ken James, 30, whose pirate apparel gave him an immediate edge in the hunt. Wearing a necklace made of sticks dipped in liquid copper and carrying a tiny music box, James descended the stairs with an unidentified bottle wrapped in a keffiyeh.
“Got the grog with me,” he explained, adding that he was expecting company. “I have some other pirate-y friends around here who have shovels.”
James and his pirate platoon are no strangers to the coastline, where they’ve checked out whale carcasses and punk shows in caves. But this, he said, was his first time “plundering booty.”
The mention of caves again whetted our appetite for adventure, and we took off for the famous Sutro Baths tunnel, where we met crypto investors James and Julian Spediacci. What would these identical twins, 36, do with the treasure?
“Put it in crypto,” James said.
“Buy an ape,” Julian volunteered.
The brothers regretted missing a hunt for rare coins hosted last year by Witter Coin, a store in the Richmond. They weren’t going to miss out again. Julian, whose luscious curls and layered necklaces gave him a seafaring look, explained that his plentiful jewelry was inspired by a more earthbound culture.
“I’m into turquoise, silver, the Southwestern vibe,” Julian said. But you can never have enough precious metals.
For some hunters, the journey is the destination. A software engineer who identified himself only as D said he just wanted to get away from his desk.
“I was in the middle of doing some things on the computer that were really frustrating me, and I was like, you know what, this is a good excuse,” he said, adding that the treasure itself wasn’t important.
“I guess I’d pay taxes on it,” he said. “If I have a theory, and that theory is right, that’s super exciting. And if it’s not, I still got to spend the day outside.”
Even our best guesses, with Claude AI chatbot assistance, were way off — proof that you can’t rely on the robots for everything, kids.
Just before publication time, organizers announced that somebody had found the treasure near Mount Sutro. The correct way to interpret the clues, it turns out, was by plotting all the mentioned landmarks on a map, drawing lines between them, and finding the point where they intersect. Better luck next time, buccaneers.