Why is Grandma Digging a Hole: 8 Reasons

Posted on March 9, 2017 by waterhigh

Forrest Fenn’s Treasure Chest

Just for Fun:

My grandmother emailed me the other day that she was digging in her backyard and called the utility marking people beforehand. The man asked her a series of questions including “why are you digging?” She found this to be a personal matter and convinced the man that he didn’t need to know why she was digging. “But” she wrote, “you could practically hear the wheels turning.” We both got a kick out of that and decided it would be a good idea to come up with the eight most plausible reasons a grandmother might be digging a hole in her backyard. Without further ado, 8 Reasons Grandma is Digging a Hole (in no particular order):

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The Junior Oxford Dictionary is Losing Touch with Nature

Posted on March 2, 2017 by waterhigh

Forrest Fenn wants to get kids off the couch and out of doors. What does this news say about our culture when “selfie stick” & “hashtag” replace words like “acorn” and “otter”? : (

Sharing this post from Lady Muir:

I was shocked to read the list of nature words removed from the Jr. Oxford Dictionary in the last decade. What follows are excerpts from an essay that explores the intersection between language and life.

via Let Nature Words Live — LadyMuir

Just Sharing a Song

Posted on February 7, 2017 by waterhigh

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTBx-hHf4BE%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26fs%3D1%26autohide%3D2%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26wmode%3Dtransparent

One tin soldier Listen people to a story That was written long ago, ’bout a kingdom on a mountain And the valley folks below. On the mountain was a treasure Hidden deep beneath a stone, And the valley people swore They’d have it for their very own. Go ahead and hate your neighbor, Go ahead […]

via One Tin Soldier — Life Through My Eyes

Forrest Fenn on TV This Weekend

Posted on September 17, 2016 by waterhigh

Saturday morning tune in to NBC’s Weekend Today Show for the latest from Forrest Fenn, who hid a treasure chest somewhere in the mountains north of Santa Fe.

Here’s a link to the interview.

Here’s a link to the announcement on Dal’s site.

How do Gemstones get their Colors ? — Know-It-All

Posted on September 3, 2016 by waterhigh

Reblogged this because it’s kinda cool:

The most common cause of color in gemstones is the presence of a small amount of a transition metal ion. Most gemstones are allochromatic, meaning that they are colored by impurities or trace elements in their crystal structure.

via How do Gemstones get their Colors ? — Know-It-All

Portal

Posted on May 31, 2016 by waterhigh

P1000420

I won’t be making it to this year’s Fennboree, but if I could, I would take a moment in Santa Fe to get a look at an ancient wrought iron gate on East Palace Avenue, the site where dozens if not hundreds of scientists, mathematicians, and physicists, after meeting with gatekeeper Dorothy McKibben, disappeared from sight beginning in April 1943. P1000401

(Well, first I might stop at that French pastry shop at La Fonda where Amy bought those gorgeous treats for Forrest’s book signing last September.)

Said portal transported those invited to the site of the Los Alamos Ranch School on a mesa in New Mexico. You probably know (part of) the rest of the story, but for me, I learned a lot from a book called Bomb, by Steve Sheinkin, my newest favorite non-fiction author. Wow. He used to write textbooks for schools but kept notes on all the things they wouldn’t let him put in–fascinating stuff I should have learned. Sheinkin puts it together in a compelling and quick read. (Young Adult level but hey, who’s got time for an academic treatise these days?)

So back to the story: the race between the Americans and the Germans to develop the bomb; some very, very brave Norwegians on a mission; the spies who wanted to steal the plans for Stalin; the guys who just wanted to give it to the Russians so there wouldn’t be only one superpower in possession of the new and terrible weapon of mass destruction.

When I was young, my ideas of Russian spies were partly based on Boris and Natasha, and hearing intimations about the McCarthy era excesses. Somehow my public school history classes never got much past the Civil War by the end of the school year, hence the black holes in my knowlege. (No, that’s not a typo; it’s spelled Fenn’s way.)

[Side note: There was a Rocky and Bullwinkle episode titled Buried Treasure. Hmm. Frostbite Falls?] P1000443

I could also rave about Sheinkin’s newest book, Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret Viet Nam War. I have no excuse for not knowing or remembering more about the topic, having been of school age when it was in the newspapers, except that the facts didn’t all make it into the media at the time. I wish that weren’t still true. History gives us perspective if we’d only choose to look at the parallels in our own day. Does your view of Ellsberg color your impression of Snowden? What caused Benjamin Arnold to switch sides? Had you even heard of the Port Chicago 50?

Do you agree with Abraham Lincoln?

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”

(Check out Steve Sheinkin’s other books like King George: What Was His Problem? or The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights or Lincoln’s Grave Robbers, etc.)

170-Year-Old Champagne Recovered (and Tasted) From a Baltic Shipwreck

Posted on May 30, 2015 by waterhigh

Worth the cold — the bottles auctioned at up to 100,000 Euros.

Ancientfoods

The term “vintage” may now have a whole new meaning for wine lovers—a treasure trove of 170-year-old champagne has been unearthed from the bottom of the sea. In 2010, a group of divers in the Baltic Sea happened upon the remains of a sunken trade schooner just off the coast of Finland. Scattered amongst the wreckage 160 feet below the surface, they discovered a treasure sent from Dionysus himself—168 bottles of French bubbly that had aged in near perfect conditions for decades.

Although the local government ultimately claimed the bottles, a team of scientists led by Philippe Jeandet, a professor of food biochemistry at the University of Reims, was able to obtain a small sample of the preserved beverage for testing—and tasting. Their chemical and sensory analysis, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a unique lens into the past, offering information about conventional winemaking…

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A Fresh Interview with Forrest Fenn

Posted on April 29, 2015 by waterhigh

Forrest Fenn’s Treasure Chest

Click on this link for a TV reporter’s interview with the man who hid the treasure.

Mr. Fenn signing my TTOTC.

1884: The great Robbery of Hawaii

Posted on February 21, 2015 by waterhigh

There be pirates . . .1884 Hawaii (reblogged below)

and treasures found with imagination

Intrepid on the Atlantic

weird history nut

Greetings once again loungers on bar stool of the bar of shame. I have yarn for ya

When one thinks of pirate raids in the pacific, one normally thinks of the great buccaneering days of south America in the 17th century or the brief age of the privateers during the war of south American Independence around 1820 or the few acts of gold fever piracy in the early 1850’s. By the time of 1880 piracy and the great buccaneering raids was well and truly a thing of the past. Or where they?

The peaceful pacific was settling down to a more gentle refined era of neocolonialism and island monarchies. It was the age when the missionaries had tamed the mighty cannibals of the pacific and the reckless beachcomber and pirates were a thing of the past. Hawaii was still a independent kingdom not yet a state of the United States.

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New Clue??? Tune in This Afternoon! Forrest Speaks

Posted on February 4, 2015 by waterhigh

Dude!

New Clue???

February 4th, 2015

News from Dal’s blog. Forrest will be on Huffington Post LIVE via web-cam about 4:45 ET this afternoon. (That would be 3:45 CST; 2:45 pm Santa Fe time; and you west-coasters can figure it out yourselves.)

Here’s a link —

http://live.huffingtonpost.com/

UPDATE

A fun interview with 2 professional treasure hunters and a treasure hider — Forrest Fenn.

Watch it yourself here — Huffington Post LIVE interview

Gold bars worth £10,000 buried on Folkestone beach

Posted on August 29, 2014 by waterhigh

If you happen to be over there….

Favorite Fennisms

Posted on August 16, 2014 by waterhigh

A year ago, I set off on my first hunt for the Fenn treasure. I’d hoped to wait until I had a complete solve, but I knew that the snows come early on the northern Rockies. I was confident that the chest was hidden somewhere north and west of Yellowstone, but couldn’t rule out the rest of Wyoming, so off I wandered, with Mr. Waterhigh’s blessing (and/or his desire that I find the gold.)

I emailed Forrest from West Yellowstone and entertained him with my story of not having the right shoes at the waters at the Continental Divide in YNP.

Forrest’s response—

“You’re having too much fun.”

I next emailed him from the Gallatin Valley to wish him a Happy Birthday, and he invited me to Santa Fe for a cup of coffee.

Decision—

Hmmm?

a.) Should I stay on course and hike to a ‘water high’ with just the grizzlies for company, or

b.) should I skip my night at the hot springs, which I really wanted to visit, and set my GPS for Santa Fe?

Forrest said,

“Life’s short and getting shorter.”

Really. It was an easy choice.

Besides, I can always go back to Montana with Mr. Waterhigh.

(We spent our 24th or 25th or 26th anniversary there. Next month is our 35th, but he’s tied up this year….)

I was somewhere in Colorado before I got ahold of Mr. W to tell him of my change of plans. He suggested I pull the old Colombo thing as I was leaving. You know, pop back in the door, “Oh. Just one more question, Mr. Fenn….” and hope to catch him off guard with the perfect question.