Excerpt from Into the Unknown:
The Remarkable Life of Hans Kraus  

by Susan E.B. Schwartz

The following excerpt describes the 1941 first ascent of High Exposure by Hans Kraus.  Rock and Ice Magazine, Senior Contributing Editor, Matt Samet, said the section contains one of the best descriptions of climbing that he’s ever read.

Unequivocally, High Exposure is a great climbing route. The renowned soloist, Derek Hersey, declared it, “brilliant,” when he soloed it in the mid-1990’s.  Climbing Magazine recently called High Exposure: “maybe the nation’s most famous rock climb.” Rock and Ice Magazine extolled: “The first ascent of this Gunks uberline marked a quantum leap in American climbing.”

But of Kraus 60 first ascents in the Shawangunks, High Exposure was also his most revealing.  Contemporary climbers have remarked that you can feel Kraus’ spirit when you climb his routes; nowhere is that truer than on the top pitch of High Exposure.

It might be a seventy-five foot hulk of quartzite conglomerate. But it captures the essence of how Kraus climbed, practiced medicine, and led his life in general.

Late one Sunday afternoon, when the sun was already low in the sky, Kraus was walking along the dirt trail at the base of the cliffs, built originally for horse drawn carriages.  Looking up, Kraus spotted a huge rock buttress.  He recalled, “I saw this big overhang and I wondered what it would be like to experience being there.”

Standing at the base of the huge buttress, Kraus could see that the bottom 150 feet would be straightforward and easy climbing — a heavily veined rock face led up to a wide ledge wedged under the buttress.  Kraus, in fact, soloed the bottom portion, without bothering to hammer in a single piton.  Now at the ledge, the real challenge began:  After belaying Wiessner [his climbing partner] up to his stance, Kraus explored his option for the remaining seventy-five feet.

Kraus still couldn’t see what lay above on the buttress.  And he could see only one way he might even reach the buttress:  On the ledge’s right side, was a roof with a notch.  Conceivably, Kraus could climb up the notch, up over the roof, and on up to the buttress. However, the first move would be blind.

Kraus would have to inch out from the ledge, look down 150 feet, lean back into space, awkwardly reach his right hand back, out, up, over the roof, and then feel around for a hold.  Even if he managed to climb up the roof, Kraus didn’t think he had the ability to down-climb it.  He also didn’t think he could survive a fall from it.

It was a one-way trip.  Once up, he could not turn back.  The decision for Kraus, though, was easy.  Kraus said, “I was scared silly.  My tongue was stuck to my throat, my throat was dry.  But I wanted it badly.  So I did it.”

Kraus leaned out from the ledge, reached his right hand out and into the notch, found a good rock edge, and climbed up.  There he gazed on the scene before him.  The rock buttress was so steep and so much wider than the ledge below had been that from his stance, it looked to Kraus as though he and the buttress were floating in air.

Air — when Kraus looked below, air —  when he looked to his left, air —  straight ahead, air —  above.  The north facing buttress, “the wall of high exposure,” as Kraus called it, seemed so much colder, windier and wilder than anyplace else in the Shawangunks.  Wiessner might have been less than fifty feet away, but Kraus felt completely alone, completely cut off.  And completely at peace.

It was on exposed rock, on soaring spaces, feeling closer to air than earth, that Kraus found order and harmony lacking in a dislocated world, a spiritual framework absent in his daily existence.   Even as a child in Trieste, he had wondered to himself, as he surely did then, What is it all about?  Why are we here?  What does it all mean?

While he realized he would never find answers to these questions, he found solace in the beauty of nature and the concrete challenges of the rock and mountains, where issues are clear and answers are absolute.  Kraus might have been disdainful of organized religion, yet he was deeply spiritual.  For him, the cliffs were a place of worship, the act of climbing a form of prayer.  ‘I don’t know what I believe,” he would often say, “but I believe it very strongly.”

Kraus still had to make it to the top.  The climbing was hard, but he could see a trail of well-defined edges leading upwards.  But would they continue to the top? Or would they stop abruptly, stranding him on his wall of high exposure?  Climbing down was never an option — he knew he couldn’t make it without falling, and he wouldn’t be able to fall without killing or hurting himself badly. 

He had no choice:  He had to keep moving up, following the holds, hoping they would continue and that he could soon hammer in a piton for his protection.

Kraus climbed higher.  And higher.  The climbing was still hard, and though the holds were still good he still found no spot for a piton.  Aware of the precariousness of his position, he tried to hammer in a piton anyway, choosing a flat, horizontal-shaped piton.   He called it a morale booster, but he also immediately knew it was no good, and that if he fell, it would pull out.

Finally, twenty-five feet up from the bottom of the buttress, Kraus found the spot.  As soon as he banged in the ring piton, he heard the telltale twang, and knew it was good and secure.  Now he could relax, thoroughly savoring the exposure to the sky and the breeze against his skin. There on the wall of High Exposure, he felt very far from the ground, very far from the worries and care of daily existence.

Kraus followed holds out to the edge of the buttress — now air to the left and right, above and below.  His heart beat fast and he thrilled to the beauty of his situation.  The climbing remained hard, but further up, he found another spot for another good, secure piton, and more good holds.  Finally, he pulled over the top.

What would have happened if the holds on the “high exposure wall” were too small or stopped abruptly?  “I don’t know.  I guess I would have prayed.” Kraus always replied to this sort of speculation.  “Or cursed.” 

In the early 1990’s, the Access Fund, a climbing organization devoted to climbers’ causes, held a fundraising party in the Shawangunks.  Local merchants donated outdoors clothes and climbing gear; others gave memorabilia or items of value.  Kraus decided to donate to the Access Fund one of the old pitons he had placed on the first ascent of High Exposure.

After years of cyclical frost and heat, snowfall and rainfall, ice coating and water drips, the piton had corroded and loosened from the rock.  Someone climbing High Exposure in the early 1990’s had pulled the piton out with his fingers, brought it down off the cliff and presented it to Kraus.  Kraus thought humorously of his old piton when the Access Foundation was soliciting donations.  He wondered whether anyone would bid for it, and put it up hoping it might bring in at least a small sum for a good cause.

To his amazement, bidding for the piton started at $500 — an exorbitant sum in a sport where there is little money to be made and where champion climbers live out of their vans to save money, even though comparable achievements in sports like golf or basketball would have made them multi-millionaires.  The closing bid for the piton was $900.

The buyer was a climber visiting from California, who had been so impressed when she climbed High Exposure a few days before, that even though she had led much harder routes, she decided she had to have the piton.  When she returned home, she hung it in a place of honor, and wrote to Kraus in delight.  “I never suffered any buyer’s remorse over having spent nearly $1,000 on it.”

Kraus wrote back to her, “Dear Miss Rogers, I never dreamed that my High Exposure piton would be valued so highly.  However, when I placed it, I never would have given it away for anything.”

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