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About A Gem of A Business

Created in the wake of a home robbery, this husband-and-wife jewelry company has clients throughout the U.S.

by Lauren Golt, August 2020

Wow! So cool to hear about. Very encouraging and inspirational. Rock on! — Kristin Walker, Little Rock, Ark.

Greatly interesting, such ideas made real.

— Benjamin Tawiah, Tema, Ghana

This is truly inspiring.

— Omotola Fawunmi, Lagos, Nigeria

About A Legend Turns 60

Grotto Pizza enjoys a big birthday this year

August 2020

We can’t visit a Delaware beach without getting a pizza from Grotto Pizza! — Michelle Sapp, Oxford, Pa.

About Where Do We Go From Here? by Larry Morris, July 2020

I really enjoyed your recent issue's focus on healing from racism and appreciated the viewpoints shared, thank you for this important conversation. — Rachel Barczak, Wilmington

About The Gift of Inspiration by Leeann Wallett, July 2020

True inspiration!

— Connie Clark Mitchell, Wilmington

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Will it be you? W i n t h i s T e n t ! O n e L u c k y R e a d e r w i l l Details on page 12.

The Garden, the Gold and Our Great Adventures

An eccentric millionaire hid a treasure in the Rocky Mountains. Why?

By Jim Miller

Eric Lippert ascends to Montana's Sheep Falls

Over the course of one week in August, tens of thousands of listeners tuned in to WXPN’s broadcast of the 1969 Woodstock music festival.

DJs played the legendary concert in its entirety—all four days of it—rising with Ritchie Havens’ spirited opener and setting with Jimi Hendrix’s incendiary finale.

Tuning in was a trip. During a sunny Saturday, I drove around town running errands, my car radio redirecting me through Max Yasgur’s farm no matter where I went.

The broadcast was billed as “Woodstock Week: Back to the Garden Again,” a clever nod to Joni Mitchell’s tribute, “Woodstock,” which she first performed a month after the festival, singing:

We are stardust, we are golden. We are caught in the devil’s bargain And we got to get ourselves Back to the garden

Of course, those last lines are, in turn, a clever nod to the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. More specifically it’s about poor Adam and Eve unwittingly playing a game of Let’s Make a Deal with a satanic serpent subbing in for Monty Hall.

“Hey, kids,” the crafty creature hisses, “this place is beat! Nothing ever happens. Take a bite of this forbidden fruit and, one day, you’ll enjoy smart phones, movies on-demand and virtual reality!”

It wasn’t an easy choice. The Landlord had been clear from the get-go about the Tree of Knowledge being off-limits with disobedience bringing eviction.

As the story goes, our ancestors are seduced by the snake into this original sin and end up on their butts—just beyond the boundary of an everlasting Paradise they once called home and to which they can never return. No do-overs. No way back.

Or is there?

Joni thought it was possible. But that was 50 years ago. In the era of acid.

Back to the garden…

My mind left Country Joe and the Fish jamming onstage and flashed back to a recent series of adventures in the Yellowstone area, where an old college buddy and I went looking for hidden treasure. Allow me to explain…

A TALE OF TREASURE

About 10 years ago, an eccentric millionaire outdoorsman by the name of Forrest Fenn hid a bronze chest full of gold and jewels somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Then he issued a challenge to the world to find it. The treasure map? It was nine clues Fenn stashed in a 24-line poem he wrote.

Hidden clues to a hidden chest of gold.

I started researching this story in November, 2018. It was an incredible premise: not a movie; not a TV show; not a video game. This was, by the looks of it, the real deal.

And, if it wasn’t—if it was all a big trick—it would still make for a great read. Hopefully.

Why would an eccentric millionaire outdoorsman hide a treasure in some secret location in the Rocky Mountains? For one, he wanted get people off the couch and back in touch with nature again.

“Get your kids out in the countryside, take them fishing and get them away from their little hand-held machines,” Fenn told TODAY in a 2013 television interview.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, there are a helluva lot of people out there—other than children—who need more time away from those machines. I was one of them. Probably still am.

So I bought into Fenn’s pitch, and dove into the story and the adventure headfirst. Along for the ride was an old college buddy of mine, Eric Lippert, whom I recruited at the end of 2018. Eric also succumbed to Fenn’s spell.

Together, Eric and I explored the area just outside the northeast corner of Yellowstone, the wilderness surrounding what is the least traveled entrance to the park.

In the middle of winter, we snowshoed over—and sometimes through—several feet of snow, into a frosted canyon, in an area in which recent reports warned of both wolves and snowslides. In the following summer, we took a rugged hike into the Beartooth Mountains and almost actually walked into a wandering moose, who was equally spooked. Then, in a vicious thunderstorm, I crossed storm-swelled rapids by shimmying across a fallen log.

There are dozens of other stories. All of them connected by a similar thread: The extreme unlikelihood that Eric and I would have ►