Every culture in the history of humanity has built monuments. We build pyramids and cathedrals; mosques, monoliths, and palaces. We scratch the sky and manufacture landscapes to commemorate, celebrate, co-opt, and coerce the spirts to notice us or to lend us something. We build structures to remind us of something lost or transport us elsewhere. They are physical structures meant to be portals to another realm; temporal or spiritual. For the religiously inclined, the great cathedrals, mosques, and temples are antennae to heaven; their towers, spires, and domes channel a great unseen energy. They provide access to difficult to reach holy places. So it goes, for skiers, with the chairlift.