People ran around San Francisco on Tuesday looking for a 22-pound chest stuffed with $10,000 worth of treasure, after organizers of the hunt posted cryptic clues about its whereabouts on Reddit.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
If you heard there was buried treasure in your city, would you hunt for it? Well, that’s what some people in San Francisco did yesterday after seeing cryptic clues on reddit describing the whereabouts of a chest brimming with gleaming ingots, currency and San Francisco artifacts. NPR’s Chloe Veltman joined a group of prospectors on the trail.
CHLOE VELTMAN, BYLINE: Eamonn McLaughlin (ph) and his friends stand in a parking lot overlooking the ruins of Sutro Baths, a historic swimming pool complex on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. He’s going over the clues.
EAMONN MCLAUGHLIN: Eighteen bold letters, preserved in a clearing, sight a dark room’s view of brave surfers reeling.
VELTMAN: The clues led a lot of people on reddit to Sutro Baths. McLaughlin and his friends asked an AI model, Google Gemini, for an assist.
MCLAUGHLIN: Plugged it in just to see what it spat out, but it just confirmed our theory.
VELTMAN: This part of the city is in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Roberta Walker, who works at the welcome center there, says it’s an odd place to look for buried treasure.
ROBERTA WALKER: Because you can’t dig around here in the national park. Suppose you can dig down at the beach, though.
VELTMAN: McLaughlin’s group did throw a shovel in their car, but after about an hour of poking around…
MCLAUGHLIN: I’m really stumped.
VELTMAN: …They decide it’s time to take it elsewhere. Next stop, Golden Gate Park.
WALKER: OK, good luck, guys.
MCLAUGHLIN: Keep you updated on it.
(LAUGHTER)
VELTMAN: They didn’t find the treasure, but others did.
AUSTIN THERIAULT: A big gold nugget…
TJ LEE: …That was in a bottle that was corked and had sand in it.
THERIAULT: Gold francs…
ERIC BARRI: Panama-Pacific Exposition bronze coin.
VELTMAN: This is Austin Theriault (ph), TJ Lee (ph) and Eric Barri (ph) describing what they found after just over an hour of searching.
LEE: Three collectible Barry Bonds baseball cards.
VELTMAN: They went back and forth about the clues all day at work. They all have jobs in tech, but Barri says they knew better than to trust the puzzle-solving skills of AI.
BARRI: They actually strengthen our take on Sutro Baths not being the place to look.
SUMMERS: Theriault says they relied on their knowledge of the city, their intuition and their smarts to decipher the clues.
THERIAULT: The ability to be, like, I know San Francisco well enough that we were able to find this first spot we checked.
VELTMAN: They found the metal box containing roughly $10,000 worth of treasure buried under a bush near a hiking trail intersection, more than 5 miles away from Sutro Baths. Chloe Veltman, NPR News, San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAVID SOLIS’ “HE’S A PIRATE & JACK SPARROW”)
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