Peace is a chairlift

You see one mountain, you’ve seen them all. Then again, maybe not. Maybe it’s just one mountain, and if that’s all you've seen, you haven’t come close to seeing them all.

But mountains do have certain universal characteristics: cold air, falling snow, steepness. And if you ski or snowboard, there are other universal characteristics: gondolas, chairlifts, joy.

Joy is chief among them, in the form of what I heard from my youngest son as we rode the chairlift together in the Sawtooth Mountains, Lutsen, Minnesota, way up there on the coast of Lake Superior.

Sam, 10, said what I've always felt while on a chairlift, no matter what chairlift, no matter what mountain: “It’s so peaceful.”