Hoofers is credited with introducing skiing in Wisconsin and first made its outing club available to the general student population in 1931. In the early 1920s, the Norwegian students at UW-Madison built a wooden ski scaffold on Muir Knoll, just a stone's throw from the Union. It was used by ski jumpers who would land at the bottom of the hill at the lake shore and ski out over the ice on the lake. A steel model replaced the original wooden scaffold in 1931, which lasted until the late '40s or early '50s when the university decided to put a parking area on the bottom of the hill.

Today, Hoofers is still the largest outing club of any public institution in the country. Its ski club boasts 600 members who travel to Vail, Utah, Jackson Hole, Lake Louise, Steamboat and Europe.