The desk on the top of Hancock Hill is metal and dark gray, maybe from the sixties. Its drawers are banged up, and its top is graffitied with initials. When you get to the desk, someone might already be there, and that’s okay, because they’ll likely leave pretty soon and you’ll have the desk to yourself, which is nice. You can be alone with the view and the wind and the sky. You can think big thoughts. You can daydream. It’s there for you.

Hancock Hill is long and saddled and ripples down in folds. The hill is the lovely backdrop to Sul Ross State University, in Alpine, rising directly behind the school’s dorms and reaching an elevation of 4,849 feet, about 350 feet above the campus below. The southern side of the hill is owned by the university, and from the Hancock summit, a great tan-colored plain stretches out to the east, toward Marathon and the Glass Mountains. To the west are the school’s red-brick buildings and the little city of Alpine. Mountains to the south, the west, and the north. This weathered place, with its yellow grass and many rocks iron-colored and red, is the result and remnant of a lava flow that occurred 37 million years ago.

In more recent geologic time, a distance runner on the Sul Ross track team named Jim Kitchen was fond of chugging up Hancock Hill when he was a student. This was 1979, and Kitchen was twenty. One of his campus jobs involved culling outdated dorm furniture. One day, an idea struck him. “I had made trails up that hill, cut cactus and made paths, and I was running it three or four times a week,” he says. “I thought, ‘It’d be really cool to have a desk up there.’ ” Kitchen picked out a desk, a heavy, stout thing, from the surplus pile and tried moving it by himself. He didn’t get very far before cajoling two friends to help him lug it to the top of the hill. “We did it at night,” Kitchen says. “I thought I’d get in trouble for stealing a desk. I never told anybody and told those guys, ‘You gotta be real quiet about this.’ ”

He stashed a notebook in the desk’s drawer so he could track his run times. He’d also, on occasion, feel compelled to jot down his thoughts on those pages. He showed the track team the desk, and they began visiting. Slowly, through word of mouth, others found it too. More people started writing in the desk’s journal. The first notebook ran out of blank pages. Then a second one and a third. “Whenever they’d get filled up, we’d take them away and put a new one in there,” Kitchen says. “It really surprised me, the things that were written—pretty moving stuff. This was all before the internet. We weren’t socially connected like we are now. But people were making a connection to nature and to each other in those notebooks. It became something pretty special.”

Sul Ross’s Archives of the Big Bend is now the keeper of the journals, which are still picked up and replaced periodically. Most of the writers are anonymous, though the notebooks’ content is remarkably consistent: lots of “BFFs forever” statements, inside jokes, prosaic advice, mentions of drunkenness, rough drawings. Over time, the “We were here” category of comments has become more common than longer, more thoughtful entries. Still, people really spill their guts.

Various declarations of love abound: friend, family, romantic. “I’ve been blessed to meet someone with the beauty this mountain has,” Tony wrote, in tiny, cramped print, in honor of his new acquaintance, Claudia. “Maybe through the chimes of time we will undertake the beauty of life and love.” “Oliver loves Leo” is another. Directly below is a response, from a different hand: “(Leo also loves Oliver.)”

Loss of Words The oldest Hancock Hill notebook entry at the Archives of the Big Bend dates to 1991. The whereabouts of the first decade of notes are unknown.

There are memories of epic events: “Pearl Harbor Day! We still remember after 78 years.” Many writers mention their appreciation of both the nearly overwhelming beauty in all directions and the friends who have accompanied them. These are a gentle salve to the heart, reminders during a tumultuous time of political unease and cultural sniping that simple presence together brings simple joy. “To take this moment here on this beautiful mountain does refresh the spirit and make the journey well worthwhile,” wrote one visitor in 1992. “The sun is warm upon my back and friends—good friends—are sitting on the nearby outcropping and peace is settling upon my soul.”

A number of visitors write thoughts that might not be released elsewhere. “My dad died when I was three,” a girl posted in 1997. “My mom got remarried six months ago. I really don’t love him that much but he is ok.” A proprietary sense seeps into a few journal entries. “I like to think that this place is all to me and that I don’t have to share it,” someone penned. “This is one of the few places on earth that you look at, without one building or anything on it. I think that is neat—untouched land.”

Some visitors go to the desk looking for refuge from grief or seeking clarity in navigating life’s complicated circumstances. “It’s been 169 days since my dearest Donnie passed,” one wrote in December 2019. “Yesterday would have been your 74th birthday. I miss you so very much. I love you so very much. I cry for you every day. It doesn’t get any easier.”