Sure enough ... there's gold in them thar hills!
In August 2025, The Northern Miner launched its Great Canadian Treasure Hunt, with 12 monthly prizes of $25,000 and a grand prize of $1,000,000. The prizes are in the form of gold coins, hidden in treasure boxes somewhere in Canada … a small enough area, right?
The hunt began with a clue being released in the form of a 13-stanza poem, with the promise of additional clues to follow each month. The first clue is another single stanza. No-one knows for sure if each monthly clue will be another stanza, but that's a decent guess: the big poem providing clues to general locations and the monthly clues providing locally specific clues.
There are many references in the big poem to Canadian mining camps and locations that have been significant in the mining history of this country. There are also escape-room style visual clues, which creates a sense that everything provided by the hunt organizers is meaningful. With more than a million dollars on the line, it's a fair bet that nothing has been left to chance or accident. The sketch of birch trees means something, as does the reversed compass.
For anyone who wants to join the hunt, deciphering clues and sleuthing out target locations on the Internet will be a necessary first step. But at some point, some of us will have to put on hiking boots, get outdoors, breath some fresh air and start kicking rocks. We'll be looking for treasure boxes that are small enough that they will not be found accidentally, but big enough that we'll recognize them once we're right on top of them.
