Op/Ed

Clippings: Up a mountain, down memory lane

MEGAN AND DANIEL on the scary ride down.

The last time we rode the chairlift to see fall foliage at the Snowbowl, in 2019, I couldn’t really appreciate the autumnal glory because I was too busy clinging to my 2-year-old’s wiggly little body, imagining it slipping under the lap bar and plummeting to her doom on the rocks below.

All four of us made it to the top alive. And it was gorgeous up there, worth the trip. But there was no way I was getting back on that thing for the return to the lodge. So I waved to my husband and older daughter as they took off down the mountain, and the toddler and I walked the whole way down on our own.

A lot has changed in five years.

This time our kids brought a friend, and the three girls confidently boarded their own chairlift ahead of my husband and me. We watched them up there ahead of us, talking and laughing and occasionally turning back to wave to us, the sunlight in their hair, and I never once pictured them falling out.

At the top, we ate a tube of cheesy chips and hiked the rest of the way to Lake Pleiad, where we found the Middlebury Mountain Club canoe that has been parked there since I was a college student 20 years ago. We paddled it around with a huge stick, and the girls caught salamanders from the rocks. Lake Pleiad is my favorite. It’s the same as it’s always been. But different, too. Now I don’t worry about the kids slipping and tumbling into the lake. I lay back on the warm rock and closed my eyes while they played.

And I wasn’t too scared to ride down this time. Which is funny in hindsight because it actually was pretty scary! I wasn’t afraid for the kids — they were having a grand time on their own chair ahead of us. But the wind was picking up, and the view from the chairlift is totally different on the way down: the whole mountain spilling out beneath us, the huge sky bumping up against our dangling feet.

It literally took my breath away.

“This is kind of scary!” I admitted to my husband, and he laughed and wholeheartedly agreed. We took a selfie so we’d always remember the time we got scared on the chairlift, and rode the rest of the way down, giddy and exhilarated, the leaves ablaze all around us.

This story first appeared in Megan James’s newsletter for MiniBury, the online resource she runs for parents and caregivers looking for fun stuff to do with their kids in Addison County. Sign up for the free weekly newsletter here.

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