THE GREAT 21ST-CENTURY TREASURE HUNT

Was there a better way to spend the past decade than on a sometimes maddening, occasionally deadly, brain scrambling search for gold hidden somewhere in the American West?

- BENJAMIN WALLACE

GROWING UP IN ARIZONA in the 1990s, Justin Posey wanted to be Indiana Jones. At age 9, he started wearing the archaeologist-adventurer’s trademark khaki pants, Stetson, and leather jacket and carrying a bullwhip nearly every day. When other kids bullied him, his mother gently suggested he dress more normally. “He wouldn’t have any part of it,” his mother, Lorri, remembers. He carried the whip until he was 13. “I got pretty good with that thing,” he says. “Of course, they wouldn’t let me bring it to school.”

Posey’s parents were both railroad engineers, and during summers at the family’s cabin in Montana, where his grandfather was a fish-and-game warden, his favorite thing to do was get out in the hills with a metal detector. He collected books of magic and magicians’ biographies and devoted himself to demystifying illusions like levitation, sleight of hand, and escapes, which he performed in his sixth-grade talent show. He tore apart his mother’s new computer (and put it back together in the face of her fury) and built himself one from off-the-shelf parts. He had a book about the Spanish conquistadores and their long-buried treasure, and with his younger brothers, he recalls, he would “forge out on our own across the desert outside of Tucson in search of hidden loot.”