I'm not really into angels.

Sorry. I just can't get excited about afterlife that involves watching you all mess up your lives, sending you magical signs, manipulating fate to your advantage and/or urging any deity to do the same. There is simply no way that good and bad things happen to us according to the sway of our buddies in heaven. If that's how it works, then heaven is super unfair and I don't want a thing to do with it.

But on Jack's Mountain, it's hard to deny that something good is at work.

I found Jack's Mountain last week on a walk into the hills behind my house. About a mile and a half up, I heard wind chimes that were hanging from a tree near the trail.

As I circled the tree for an explanation, I noticed two mailboxes lodged in a boulder.

Huh?

I opened one and peered inside. There was a published children's book titled "Jackie Jack." The story is about Jack Edwards, a toddler who died of leukemia in 1995. At the end of the book, his parents scatter his ashes from the top of a mountain in Salt Lake City.

Then I pulled out the notebooks -- at least a half-dozen, each labeled. "Jack's Journal."

If you've been to many mountains here, you know that summit logs are not uncommon. People usually write the date, the weather, any wildlife sightings and their names.

Jack's Journals are different.

First, people address their entries to Jackie Jack: "Dear Jack," "Hey, Jack," "Hi, Jack."

Then, for some reason, they spill their guts.

People have written about failed marriages, stress at work, fights with friends. They've waxed poetic, waxed philosophical. And there is one possible suicide note: "Hope I'll join you soon."

Um.

The first entry in the first journal is from Jack's mother. It was 1997, and Jack's family was about to leave his mountain and move to Illinois.

"We know our sweet angel Jack will be with us wherever we go," she wrote. "Please take a moment to say hello to Jackie Jack and write a little (or long) note."

In 12 years, those little notes have raised some big prayers: for patience with a girlfriend, to comfort a friend with lymphoma, for help surviving medical school.

See, I don't pray FOR stuff. I kinda figure any supreme being worth his snot should already know what we need. But in their volumes of pleas and confessions and joys and sorrows, these hikers have inscribed a compelling hope that someone is listening -- if not a great big God, a little boy named Jack.

Or it could be just an accidental testament left for people like me, who wandered into the hills because once you've lifted up thine eyes unto them, you want to see what's really there.

You don't expect to find yourself at the intersection of a hundred lives and one child's seemingly senseless death. But it's hard to feel alone where so many people believe we're just a little lower than the angels.

Erin Alberty has more Utah adventures and musings on her blog, poorpenmanship.com.