The locals rubbed their eyes in disbelief. Was this strange man wearing a carnival costume? Were those two strange-looking wooden boards and his cane part of the get-up?
It was early February 1891 when one Dr Robert Pilet introduced the rest of Europe to Norway’s outlandish pastime of skiing.
He disembarked from a train at the railway station in upland Titisee in Germany’s Black Forest. Then he proceeded to the nearby Feldberg mountain to go skiing, an unheard-of activity thereabouts. That day 2m of new snow had fallen on the 1 493m mountain.
Pilet, a 33-year-old French diplomat, would need three hours to make the 10km trek on his wooden boards up to the Feldberger Hof hotel, and another two hours to the summit. He walked up 1 000m of altitude on his boards, then started gliding down.
With evening falling, he returned to the hotel and left this entry inscribed in its guest book: “R Pilet, doctor, Heidelberg, February 8, 1891, with Norwegian snow shoes.”
“This was the start of skiing 125 years ago in the Black Forest, and for that matter in Central Europe,” says Reinhard Janus of the Todtnau skiing club. “It was during his travels in Scandinavia that Pilet had learned how to glide over the snow with the wooden boards. They were called ‘skis’ in Norway.”
The rest of the world adopted the word. In the months after Pilet’s pioneering trek on skis, more and more tourists began arriving on the Feldberg mountain to try out the new-fangled notion of winter sport.
The rest, as they say, is history. The Black Forest Ski Museum is the place to go to learn about the sport’s beginnings. The museum is housed in the more than 300-year-old Hugenhof farmstead in Hinterzarten.
At the end of the 19th century only the affluent could afford to go skiing on their winter holidays and to stay at the luxurious Feldberger Hof. But fairly soon, Black Forest locals – preachers, policemen, postal workers, even midwives – also began to get around on skis.
It was a carpenter, Ernst Koepfer, from the village of Bernau, south of the Feldberg, who first recognised the economic potential. In 1892 he was the first man in Central Europe to make skis serially. His grandson Walter runs a private museum dedicated to his pioneering ancestor.
In the remote Schollach Valley, innkeeper Robert Winterhalder thought long and hard at the outset of the 20th century about how to entice skiers to his Schneckenhof inn.
On a slope across from the inn, he set up five wooden masts, and built stations at the bottom and top, all connected by a pinion-driven steel cable with special bars and wooden handles attached for the skiers to hold. The motor was driven by hydropower supplied by his mill. On February 14, 1908, the Schollach ski lift went into operation. It was all of 280m long and covered an altitude rise of 23m.
“It was the first one in the world,” says Winterhalder’s grandson, Klaus. The ski lift was an immediate hit, triggering a rush of winter sports enthusiasts. Just to make sure, brochures were also printed to promote the lift.
On the Feldberg, what started out as an exotic sport has long since become winter fun for everyone.
DPA