With summer coming to a close, I realize there’s a plenty of drafts yet to be posted. But here’s something I did spend a LOT of time on: the Utah Treasure Hunt.

A couple of realtors in Salt Lake have put this on since the pandemic started. This year, they hid a CASH prize of 25 THOUSAND DOLLARS. As you can see, Kylee and I were pretty motivated to find that money.

We scoured trails all over the valley from Bountiful to Draper to Tooele

Why such a large demographic? Well, the map was a little vague on where to begin our search.

Only nine counties are included, but who’s counting?!

Thousands of locals were scouring our beautiful mountains. We knew our chances of finding it were pretty minimal. But man, it was such a good time. I took the kids to new hikes:

Taylor, Kylee, Joe, and I spent a lot of time looking over the poem and the hints. It was almost all we talked about when we were apart.

The hikes were the best part though. Though Taylor and Joe joined a couple times, Kylee and I mostly did it together. Nothing better than hiking around with family.

The scenery didn’t hurt either. 🙂 (credit to Ky for the photos!)

Anyway, long story short, we did NOT find the treasure. (But oh man did we have plans how to spend our halves… personally, I was going to laser my eyeballs out.) There were a handful of times that we REALLY thought we had figured out the poem. And, actually, I think we did solve the poem. At least, we found hikes that would have worked as solves, all the way down to the time theme. But, the creators had a different location in mind. I am almost relieved that their “solve” was so far-fetched that I could not have possibly solved it. 🙂 Check out the video here if you’re interested: 2023 Utah Treasure Hunt Poem Solve – YouTube.

Of course, it’s not about the not finding money. From the start, we were clear that the real treasure was bonding over a silly puzzle with family members and getting outside more often. The real treasure was the community… and the booty we all made along the way.