MENDOCINO COUNTY, CA — Three amateur treasure hunters who spent Tuesday morning triangulating the base of a spectacular double rainbow over the Northern California coastline arrived at their coordinates shortly after noon expecting to find a pot of gold, and instead discovered a moderately well-organized methamphetamine operation being run out of a 1998 Fleetwood Bounder motorhome parked in a small dirt clearing.
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The rainbow, which had appeared briefly following an early-morning storm and was described by one hunter as “the most vivid one I have seen in my life, honestly, this thing had two arcs,” ended, sources confirmed, “right on top of the RV.”
“We were pumped,” said the group’s ringleader, a 34-year-old warehouse shift supervisor, one of three friends who had driven out from Sacramento at 4 a.m. that morning after tracking a live rainbow map on Reddit. “We hiked in for like an hour. We were, like, giddy. And then we pushed through the last of the brush and there was just — there was an RV. There was an RV, and there was a guy in a tank top standing outside it, and there were, like, buckets.”
The shift supervisor paused.
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“He was not thrilled to see us,” he added.
The RV’s sole occupant, a 51-year-old man who identified himself only as an independent chemist and who at no point during the encounter set down the wrench he was holding, reportedly expressed both surprise and displeasure at the arrival of three men with metal detectors and a shared belief that a large amount of gold coins had been divinely deposited at his location.
“They kept, like, gesturing at the sky,” the motorhome’s occupant told reporters Wednesday, having agreed to be interviewed under the condition that his last name, exact coordinates, and current business operations not be described in detail. “They kept saying the rainbow, the rainbow. I said, what rainbow. They said, look up. I looked up. There was no rainbow. It was gone. It was, like, 12:15.”
He paused.
“I didn’t know what to do with these guys,” he said. “I run a very specific kind of operation. I do not have systems in place for this.”
The hunters, sources confirmed, were slow to update their prior. The shift supervisor’s brother-in-law, a 31-year-old dental equipment salesman, reportedly asked the chemist, at one point, whether he was “sure” there was no gold on his property. The chemist reportedly informed him that he was, in fact, sure.
“He asked if maybe there was, like, a chest or something buried under the RV,” the salesman confirmed. “I felt like it was worth asking. I felt like — you know, if you drive a couple hours, you at least ask.“
The third hunter, a 28-year-old who has, sources confirmed, “an eBay store for metal detector accessories,” reportedly attempted to salvage the trip by scanning the perimeter of the clearing for anything of value. His metal detector, over the course of eleven minutes, registered what he described later as “a whole lot of, like, structural signals.”
Those signals, sources confirmed, were coming from the RV.
The chemist, throughout the encounter, remained unusually patient. He explained, twice, that he was not the leprechaun. He explained, once, that the rainbow was a meteorological phenomenon and did not have a specific terrestrial endpoint. He offered the men a warm can of Mountain Dew from a cooler that had, sources confirmed, previously contained other items. They accepted.
By 1:47 p.m., the hunters had agreed to leave.
He walked them back to the trailhead.
At the trailhead, the chemist reportedly shook each of their hands, thanked them for being “respectful about it,” and gave the shift supervisor his cell number “in case they saw any other rainbows out this way.” The shift supervisor took the number. He has not, at press time, called it.
He has, however, saved it in his phone as Rainbow Guy.
The double rainbow was, meanwhile, gone.
The shift supervisor said the group was already discussing where to go next.
“There was another one over Humboldt this morning,” he said, checking his phone. “You never know.”
At press time, the chemist was, sources confirmed, packing up.
He had, he said, been thinking of relocating anyway.