KEY POINTS:
The modern world has passed by the people of the remote Austrian Alpine valley of Kaisertal.
Kept in splendid isolation, its population - all 35 of them - have got used to living a remote life. But progress, if that is what it is, is coming. And things will never be the same again.
Centuries of isolation are to end with a road linking the last truly cut-off Alpine community with the rest of their Teutonic brethren. Now the residents of the 30 buildings clinging to the mountain slopes 1500m up can kiss goodbye to their piston legs built by the effort of marathon climbing just to get milk from the shops far, far below.
Several of the Kaisers, as the locals are called, have tried for at least a century to convince their leaders they needed a proper road.
Three hundred wooden steps and a steep mountain road suitable only for four-wheel-drives have been their lifeline - that and a crude aerial rope-way deployed to winch up food, medicine and other supplies when the human pack-mule residents did not feel up to it.
Soon the hard life will be gone. A road costing $13.5 million, blasted out of granite, will connect the Kaisers with the hinterland below.
Josef Ritzer, mayor of the Ebbs region, which includes Kaisertal, said: "I want this road laid because people were threatening to desert the village otherwise. I don't want this picturesque place abandoned. We want people to stay, but we have to give them the same opportunities as people in the town."
The Kaisers are nothing if not patient. Their first official appeal for a road to connect them to Kufstein, a small town down the mountain, came in 1900, when the community numbered about 100. A second was launched in 1970.
But it was only in 1996 that they finally threatened to leave unless the road was built.
Last year something must have resonated in the Austrian public works ministry when someone rubber-stamped the plans for a road that would drag them into the 19th century.
Next March they will be able to use their own, exclusive road, closed to all but them in order to stop the valley being used as a staging post by lazy hikers wanting a leg up. Visitors will continue to use the 300 steps.
Jakob Leitner, now 75, had to climb the mountain every day for 45 years to get to his job in Kufstein. His 8-year-old granddaughter Sarah is happy that the road is coming.
"I cannot wait for my friends to visit me and for me to be able to visit them without worrying too much how I get home if it gets too late."
For now, her mother, Ursula, always waits for her at the end of the 300 stairs when she comes back home. Ursula recalled a moment when Sarah became ill last year and she had to carry her all the way down to take her to hospital.
The community hopes that with the new road the hamlet will start to grow again. Years ago it numbered 70 souls but many, mostly young, chose the bigger world. It is hard for them to find spouses willing to live in isolated Kaisertal.
Josef Schwaighofer, 43, was born in Kaisertal and says he has never thought about leaving.
"But fewer and fewer people appreciate the slow rhythm of life here. The [road away] is like an escape to the younger people. Life today is not like it used to be when I was 20."
Nor will it ever be again.
- Observer
