Unlike many skiers, I enjoy riding slow chairlifts. In addition to giving aching, middle-aged muscles a rest, you get to see a lot of things from a lift, and not just hotdoggers who ski so well you feel like retreating to the lodge for the rest of your skiing life.

At Lake Louise, we listened to a middle-aged man coax his furious, scared wife down a moguls run, shouting, "I'm SORRY, I'm SORRY, honey" as she inched down the bumps. Bet he had to sleep in the hotel lobby that night.

At Nub's Nob, I watched a little boy, still in the pole-free stage of learning to ski, flapping his arms like a baby bird as he tried to get some "air" on a miniature snow ramp.

My all-time favorite is the orange lift on the back hills of Nub's Nob. It ascends through a quiet forest, where tiny birds dart back and forth. On the orange lift, you can go eyeball-to-eyeball with a squirrel scampering up a tree. The clinking of the old metal lift parts sounds like Buddhist temple bells among the snow-covered pines.

Mostly, sitting on the slow chairlift gives my mind a chance to meander around aimlessly, which, while not particularly productive, is recuperative in its own way. So when I watched "Solilochairliftquist," which was profiled in the Sunday Denver Post, I knew that I wasn't the only skier who felt, as the article's title puts it, "the Zen of a slooow chairlift."