Several days ago I was hired to guide a Santa Barbara fellow to a remote Indian ruin in one of The area's back canyons. To make a very long story short, from a high cliff vantage point, far below we saw two people, a man and a woman(we could hear their voices)wearing neon blue and neon green jackets. Now this is in an area where only very experienced hikers venture. Serious back country hikers never, and I say never, wear fluorescent clothing - because they generally don't want to be seen. Its kind of a pride thing.

So as it turned out, we came within twenty yards of the couple in the bush but we did not make contact with them. When we came to where they had been I decided to follow their tracks. Its not a place you would normally run into other hikers. I was wondering where they were going. We followed the pair's tracks several hundred yards into a side canyon. It was easy as the dry creek we were in was full of wet sand.

After a few hundred yards the tracks simply stopped, vanished. "What the hell, I thought." I have seen this sort of thing before. I have a lifetime of backwoods experience and am as good as the best there is and I could not find where the couple might have taken a side route out of the precipitous walled canyon.

There was no route where they could have gone -- we searched all around the floor of the canyon. We walked back out of the side canyon and hiked up to the high ruin we were originally going to. We could see the entrance to the side canyon and in the two hours we were there the couple never came back out.

One more High Strangeness Sedona mystery. Who were they -- and where did they go?