On a recent ski trip, I was riding a high-speed chair lift when I realized that it was a pretty good miracle.
Out in what amounts to the middle of nowhere, in formidable terrain, in harsh conditions, you get to the top of a mountain in a few minutes. Without the chairlift, some of those hikes up the mountain might be measured in days.
On one of our days, we rode over 24,000 vertical feet of lifts, which is getting somewhere in the Mt. Everest range of vertical rise.
[Just to add a miracle on top of the miracle, your lift ticket (which now has an embedded RFID chip), is automatically scanned when you mount a chair, and you can go to a website and it will list the chair lifts you rode and calculate the vertical rise you completed that day]
