Two Years Missing: How the Mountains Marked Alex Harper
Summer 2018, Colorado’s Elk Mountains
Alex and Jessica Harper had always loved the mountains.
For them, the wilderness was a place of clarity, of shared silence and laughter.
Friends often teased them about their weekend “adventures,” but for Alex and Jessica, there was nothing ordinary about leaving the city behind for two days of climbing, stargazing, and early-morning hikes.
They packed light: two backpacks, climbing gear, sleeping bags, and a GoPro mounted to capture the landscapes and small, everyday moments—the sort that seem insignificant until they vanish.
On the first night at their campsite, they set up a modest fire, cooking sandwiches and sharing jokes about filming “the perfect mountain vlog.” Jessica meticulously arranged their gear beside her sleeping bag, while Alex fiddled with the camera, making sure the angle captured the glow of the fire and the jagged silhouettes of the surrounding peaks.
Everything was calm, predictable.
By morning, the Harper couple set off on a ridge hike farther into the Elk Mountains.
The trail was rougher than expected, steep cliffs rising on one side and dense pine forest dropping away on the other.
They filmed intermittently, laughing and joking, recording clips for their vlog.
At one point, Jessica’s voice carries in the GoPro audio: “Alex… do you feel like… we’re being watched?” He laughs it off, teasing her about paranoia, but in the video, a shadow seems to linger behind a cluster of rocks, just out of frame.
Two days later, the Harpers were reported missing.
Rangers arrived at the campsite to find everything left in place: the fire smoldering, backpacks unzipped, sandwiches untouched.
The GoPro lay atop a rock, still recording.
Its last footage showed Jessica adjusting the camera and whispering, “Did you hear that?” Then faint, indistinct voices, followed by a sudden cut to black.
The search teams scoured the mountains for weeks.
Helicopters swept the peaks, drones combed the valleys, yet no trace of the couple emerged.
Their disappearance went cold, the case filed away as one more mystery of the Rocky Mountains.
Climbers ascending a remote summit stumbled upon something that chilled them to the bone: a body, wrapped neatly in canvas, lying inside a perfect circle of stones.
The placement was meticulous, almost ritualistic.
It was Jessica.
Her face bore no signs of trauma; she appeared… posed, almost deliberately preserved in death.
The discovery sent shockwaves through the small mountain town of Leadville.
Days later, Alex Harper was found alive, wandering alone near a ridge several miles from the discovery site.
He was emaciated, his clothes tattered, muttering incoherently about a “watcher” that had attacked them.
At first, investigators believed Alex had suffered from exposure or trauma-induced delirium.
But when they searched his belongings, they found a hand-drawn map labeled “Stone Circle Site”, dated weeks before their trip.
The implication was immediate and terrifying: Alex had known where the circle would be before it even existed.
During questioning, Alex insisted he could not remember the journey between leaving the campsite and being found.
He spoke of misty forests, whispering shadows, and a “voice calling from the rocks.
” Authorities noted his fixation on certain phrases captured in his GoPro: “They’re waiting… don’t trust the light… it’s closer than you think.”
The GoPro’s footage became the only window into the days that had vanished.
On reviewing the files, investigators noticed something impossible: sequences filmed from Alex’s perspective that seemed to place him in the stone circle before Jessica’s death, though he claimed to have never been there.
Other clips captured fleeting glimpses of figures—sometimes human, sometimes not—watching them from the edges of the frame, disappearing whenever approached.
Forensic teams found no signs of an external attack on Jessica.
No footprints around the circle beyond what seemed to be Alex’s.
No blood, no defensive wounds.
The initial assumption that Alex had been defending himself from an unknown assailant began to crumble.
But the hand-drawn map revealed something far more disturbing.
In precise, obsessive detail, it traced the ridges, boulders, and hidden paths leading to the circle.
It included strange annotations—symbols Alex could not explain, yet in the GoPro footage, he was seen referencing them, almost instinctively.
Investigators hypothesized he might have been planning the journey subconsciously—or that someone or something had guided him.
Further investigation of the GoPro footage uncovered subtle inconsistencies.
Shadows moved independently of light sources; footsteps echoed where no terrain existed; certain trees in the background would appear, disappear, then reappear between consecutive frames.
Alex himself seemed to shift subtly between shots, as if time had fractured around him.
One night, a forensic analyst reviewing the GoPro footage noticed a figure standing at the summit near the stone circle—a figure wearing what appeared to be Alex’s jacket.
The timestamp indicated it was filmed after the body of Jessica had been discovered.
The footage cut abruptly when the figure turned toward the camera, revealing a face Alex had never seen.
The revelation sparked a chilling theory: someone—or something—was replaying Alex’s movements, mimicking him with terrifying precision.
But why? And how could the figure appear after the fact in recorded footage?
Alex was questioned again, but his answers were inconsistent.
At times, he seemed to remember, at others, he insisted he was only following “instructions in the wind.” He claimed that the stone circle had been calling to him long before the trip, that Jessica had laughed at him when he described hearing it whispering his name, and that he had seen the circle in dreams weeks before they arrived.
Investigators noted a psychological pattern consistent with shared delusions or extreme trauma—but nothing could explain the accuracy of the map.
A tech specialist decided to examine the GoPro’s internal memory in detail.
The device revealed hidden files, corrupted and initially overlooked.
After reconstruction, these clips showed Alex moving through areas of the mountain without leaving footprints, climbing ridges that would have been impossible to navigate alive.
One clip even showed him standing behind the stone circle, filming the camera from a different angle, as if he had been in two places at once.
The most disturbing discovery came in the last recovered clip: Alex whispering to Jessica, “We don’t belong here… they’re waiting for us.” Behind him, the camera’s wide-angle lens captured faint, glowing symbols etched into rocks—a pattern matching the symbols on his map.
Jessica turns, confusion in her eyes, then screams, a sound cut off mid-shout by static.
It was the first evidence that some external force—natural or supernatural—might have influenced their movements, guiding Alex to the site and orchestrating Jessica’s death.
In late 2020, after months of therapy and interviews, Alex returned to Leadville, attempting a normal life.
He bought a cabin near the mountains, hoping distance might dull the memory.
Friends noticed his behavior remained erratic; he avoided the woods, checked his locks obsessively, and sometimes stared for hours at the distant peaks.
Then, one morning, neighbors found his cabin empty.
Doors locked, windows latched from inside.
On the table lay a new hand-drawn map, identical in style to the previous one, leading deep into the Elk Mountains.
In the snow outside, only one set of footprints disappeared into the trees—and never returned.
The last GoPro clip recovered from his cabin shows Alex speaking directly to the camera, pale and wide-eyed:
“They know… they’ve marked the path… I’m following… or they are following me… I can’t tell…”
And then the camera tilts down, capturing the floorboards splitting, as if something massive is moving beneath.
The clip ends abruptly.
No one has seen Alex since.
And the stone circle, undisturbed and silent, waits for the next visitor.
