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“Here here!” everyone shouted, and as the laughter died down, Finn’s wail picked up.
“Oh, here we go,” Aubrey sighed, putting her nearly untouched beer down on the table. She rose, but turned to face everyone before departing. “Thank you all for bringing my brother back to me. And thanks to you, Emily,” she turned to face the woman I loved, “for loving him and seeing exactly whathe needed. I hope your adventures are full of love and discovery. And I hope you’ll stay in at least one yurt somewhere along the line.”
“Actually, there are yurts at this place I want to visit in Norway,” Emily said excitedly.
“We’ll go there next,” I told her, willing to go anywhere she’d allow me along.
“Hey,” Lucy said. “There’s an article, right? Do we get to see it?”
Emily reached down into her bag. “The print version isn’t out yet, but I printed the piece from the site with all the photos for you.” She pushed a little folder out into the center of the table, with a huge photo of the resort on the front. The title, stretched across the top of the piece read, “The Kasper Ridge Hunt Reveals Much More than Treasure.” I’d read it before, so I moved back and let my friends read for the first time.
There were numerous oohs and ahhs, and Lucy pulled the piece in front of her and spread it open as others gathered behind her to read.
“Kinda disappointed you didn’t work the word ‘booty’ into the title,” Sasquatch joked.
“I really did try,” Emily told him.
I dropped my arm around her shoulders as I settled back into my seat, and she leaned her head into me. As I watched my friends and family read her work, I leaned back, utterly content. The woman I loved was at my side and everything in my world was perfect and complete. I couldn’t wait for the next adventure, but for now, I would revel in the calm of just being here, being in love. Being at Kasper Ridge. Being home.
EPILOGUE 1
The Cover Story from Travel Adventure Magazine, January 2024
The Kasper Ridge Hunt Reveals Much More than Treasure
by Emily Schaeffer
All travelers are on a hunt of some kind. And if travel takes you to the mountains of western Colorado, you might be hunting great skiing, good food, luxury accommodations, or guided adventure. But if your travel takes you to Kasper Ridge Resort, you’ll learn about a hunt of a different kind that’s been going on behind the scenes of the resort’s impressive renovation and relaunch for the last four years: A legitimate, old-fashioned treasure hunt. With a map and everything.
Some readers will recall a man named Forrest Fenn, an art collector in the southwest who published a poem in the newspaper that led the way to a chest full of gold and jewels, thus inciting a lengthy and dangerous frenzy that cost several treasure hunters their lives. This story is similar in some ways—certainly inspired by the tale of Mr. Fenn—but with a much happier ending.
The Hunt for Treasure
In 2019, Archie and Aubrey Kasper received notice that their great uncle Marvin had died, and that he’d left them the resort property they’d spent summers at as children. A huge swath of land in Colorado held an old, run-down resort and a defunct ski mountain was now theirs.
Archie had just finished his time in the navy as an F/A-18 pilot, and his sister was looking for somewhere to focus, having recently finished college. They agreed to head to Colorado and see if the resort was something they might refurbish.
But in addition to the words the will offered and the deed to the property, Marvin’s attorney gave them something else: A shoebox that held two pieces of a crumpled map and a letter from their uncle that didn’t go far toward explaining what the map was all about.
They saved the pieces and got on with the work of assessing the resort. In the process, however, new clues began to reveal themselves. A poem scribbled on a guest room wall with a key taped beneath it. A neighbor with another piece of the map, discovered once they’d figured out that the key opened an old gate to a private park. That piece had letters on it, which eventually matched to symbols. That connection was discovered when a guest inadvertently knocked one of the photos in the bar from the wall. The back of the photo held one part of the key to what a contractor’s 7-year-old daughter identified as a rebus puzzle.
But that only left them with another confusing scramble of words. This one, unlike the poem, contained other clues—words like copyright, movie, and Lola.
In a convoluted journey consisting of some deduction on the part of the Kaspers and an awful lot of luck (discovering that an old stuffed bear was named Rudy after Kasper’s nemesis, RudyFusterburg?), they unraveled the confusing mysteries Uncle Marvin had left for them to find. And eventually? They found treasure.
The History of Kasper Ridge
The Kasper Ridge Resort as it stands now was built by Marvin Kasper in 1963, but the Kasper family owned much of the land around the resort as early as 1927, when they built and operated the Kasper Ridge Hotel, a stopping place for those crossing the Rockies and hunting gold in the mountains. The hotel was a luxury establishment, even for the time, offering electricity, running water, and relying on a gas stove in the main kitchen.
It was in that place, just off the main highway, that Marvin Kasper grew up, inspiring in him a love of the country he lived in and the sweeping and terrifying beauty it afforded. He spent his days learning about the mountain, exploring, and delighting in discovery.
In the forties, however, Kasper discovered another love—movies. It was that fascination that led him to leave Kasper Ridge when his parents died and the hotel shut down, and head for Hollywood. Through grit, determination, and a willingness to talk to anyone and everyone, he worked his way into a role as a writer, and found incredible success penning many of the classic films of the fifties with his partner, Rudy Fusterburg. Together, they built a small company called Mountaintop Studios, and enjoyed a decade of renown, glad-handing with movie stars and producers.
There was to be at least one more great love in Marvin’s life, however, and this one was simply unattainable. Annie Lowe, the star of several of the pair’s movies, caught Marvin’s attention—and Rudy’s too. The pair fell for her simultaneously, and Annie, whose real name was Lola, became the tip of a triangle thatlasted several years and inspired a pact between the two men. Agreeing that neither of them would risk their friendship with one another or their relationship with Lola, they shook hands and vowed that neither man would pursue her romantically.
Though it broke Marvin’s heart, he was a man of his word.
Rudy, however, proved to be a different sort of man.
