Rescuers said a woman hunting for treasure in Wyoming needed crews to rescue her not once, but three times over three years, all from the same area, defying warnings to stay away.
A witness told emergency workers that he saw a woman getting out of an SUV at the Jim Mountain trails west of Cody, the Park County Sheriff’s Office told the Missoulian. That witness said the SUV apparently sat there for three days.
Rescuers identified the woman as 41-year-old Madilina Taylor of Lynchburg, Virginia.
Taylor had fallen and broken her ankle not far from there in June of 2015, in the Big Creek area of the Star Hill Ranch, the newspaper adds. Two years earlier, she and her boyfriend, Frank Eugene Rose Jr., reportedly got lost in the woods there.
Each time, rescuers brought her to safety. They warned her after the second rescue not to return until she got more training in wilderness survival, the newspaper reported.
The two claimed they were searching for loot hidden by art dealer Forrest Fenn, who wrote in two books that he had hidden treasure worth millions of dollars somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.
Officials say they can't arrest her simply for exploring public land. “The only thing the sheriff’s office can do is arrest them for trespassing on private property, if they go on private property,” rescuer Lance Mathess said. “For the most part they’re on national forest land.”
Mathess added that most rescuers are volunteers using a small plane with fuel costs running at roughly $50 per hour.
“People from the big cities and metropolitan areas are so used to help is just a phone call away,” Mathess told the Missoulian. “I just think they have financial blinders on or economic blinders on. They can’t see anything but the treasure.”
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