Passage l .     .

   Sante fe, New Mexicomultimillionaire Fortest Fenn has always loved a good 'adventure. As a smallchild before eight, he and his brother, Skippy spent summer vacations makingexploration in Yellowstone National Park.

 '   As a teen, Fenn idolized the decorated WorldWar II fighter pilot, called Robin Olds and later emulated his hero during TheVietnam War as an Air fighter pilot to go to New Mexico and settled there as anarts and antiques dealer, hunting down valuable paintings, rugs, warmemorabilia, and other antique to sell.

    In 1998, Fenn was diagnosed with terminalkidney cancer. As he had always been doing, he conceived a grand adventuredthat he assumed would be his last one. "I wanted to create some excitement, some hope, before Idied," says Fenn, 82, adding that he also wanted to "get kids out ofthe game room and off the couch." With those ideas in his mind, he startedto devise a treasure hunt.

   Little by little, Fenn beganstocking a small bronze chest with gold coins, prehistoric bracelets and othervaluable things. When his cancer went into remission in 1993, he decided hewould carry out his plan anyway.

   In 2010, Fenn topped offthe chest with jewels and valuable stones and hid it somewhere deep in theRocky Mountains, north of Sante Fe. Later that year, he wrote a poem for hisself-published memoir, The Thrill of the Chase. It contained nine clues aboutthe treasure box's whereabouts. One stanza reads like this: Begin it where warmwaters halt/And take it in the canyon down/Not far, but too far to walk/Put inbelow the home of Brown.

    A few months later, a story about the treasure appeared in a magazine.Since then, Fenn has received thousands of e-mails from treasure hunters. Somerequest more clues to the box. But mostly "people thanked me for bringingtheir family together," he says with a self-comforting smile on his face.

  In April, Fenn told a crowd at an Albuquerque bookstore that two groupsof treasure hunters had gotten within 500 feet of the chest. "They walkedright by it," he said.

   Fenn is confident thatthe treasure will be unearthed eventually and says it will take theright combination of cunning and perseverance. "It will be discovered by someone who has read the clues carefullyand successfully. But nobody is going to happen upon it," hepredicts.  .

   He hopes that whoeverfinds the loot will relish the riches and the adventure of finding them.