According to the weather archives, December 1934 was the warmest for 50 years. It is not known whether this influenced the birth of the Swiss hiking trails 90 years ago. In any case, the reason was less the weather and the inviting Swiss countryside than the developing traffic conditions.

Amazing from today's perspective: there was no reason for a long time. to create paths only for people without a vehicle. For thousands of years, paths and roads were there for those who needed them. Some users were a little wider, others a little narrower, they didn't differ much in speed unless a coachman was galloping his draught horse.

But at the beginning of the 20th century, the car arrived and took its place. A little later, by the way, in the canton of Graubünden, where cars were banned until 1925. Things were different on the Klausen Pass, for example. There, secondary school teacher Hans Jakob Ess hiked with his class towards the top of the pass. The traffic, the dust on the still unpaved road, the noise and the exhaust fumes made the school trip a "frustrating tour", according to the chronicle of the Swiss hiking trails.

Ess then looked for like-minded people and found them in Otto Binder, head of Pro Juventute and the Federation of Swiss Youth Hostels in personal union. Together they founded the Zurich Working Group for Hiking Trails. The first routes always led from a streetcar terminus, i.e. from the outskirts of Zurich, out into nature. The Swiss singletrail network thus began to grow in the canton of Zurich.

This was in 1933 and the following year, Ess and Binder, together with other interested parties from other cantons, founded the Swiss Hiking Trail Association on 15 December, the forerunner of the Swiss Hiking Trail Association, as it is known today.

On the day they were founded, the hiking trail promoters established the yellow signpost as a signal that still shows where to go to the next destination and often the one after that.

Although with one interruption: during the Second World War, the army removed all hiking trail signposts to make it more difficult for invading troops to find their way. However, this had the effect of making paper route suggestions and guided group hikes all the more popular, writes the Swiss Hiking Trail Association. And after the end of the war, the yellow signs were put back in place "with all the more commitment".

In the following decades, 65,000 kilometers of hiking trails were created and hiking became the number one popular sport in Switzerland, something that has not changed to this day.

Which is not to say that the hiking trails were undisputed. Because many of them gradually became paved roads with car traffic. This prompted Hugo Bachmann to launch the hiking trail initiative in the 1970s. The popular initiative demanded that the cantons maintain a network of hiking trails and that unpaved hiking trails could only be asphalted if a replacement was created elsewhere. Voters approved the initiative in 1979 with over 77% in favor, making it one of the most successful proposals at the ballot box to date.

Until 2017, when the bike path initiative was put to the vote in an unmistakable reference to the hiking trail initiative and also received a strong majority of 73%. Mountain bikers were not an issue in the referendum campaign. It was not until parliament extended the obligation of the cantons to create and maintain recreational routes in addition to cycle paths for everyday traffic.

Independently of this, however, those hiking trails in particular that are as wide as single trails are a playground for hundreds of thousands of mountain bikers. The cantons handle bike traffic on narrow trails differently and the bikers who follow the yellow signs are not undisputed.

But it is clear that the Stollenritter community also has every reason to raise a glass to the 90th birthday of this great trail network. And, if they haven't already done so, to join the Swiss Hiking Trail Association and become part of the community that looks after this densely woven network.