Franz Schroffenegger from Tiers am Rosengarten was not only a very capable mountain guide, but he did his most difficult tours without pay with friends and colleagues like Franz Wenter and Tita Piaz. With Wenter, he climbed the vertical wall of the Delago Tower into the Purgametsch Valley; with Piaz, he travelled from the Dolomites to the Wilder Kaiser in October 1908 to help solve a much-discussed problem of that time: the ascent of the Totenkirchl west face. In the series of Kirchl chimneys, he immortalized himself with a Schroffenegger chimney, made the fourth and fifth ascents of the Fleischbank east face in July 1912, and conquered the "Strapiumbi-Nord" on the Campanile Val Montanaia. The Grasleitenturm became his mountain of destiny.

But Schroffenegger-Franz was also a real stubborn South Tyrolean. He had a client who, at the start, when Franz tied the rope around his chest, would say an Our Father. On the summit, he asked the guardian angels for active help, and during the descent, on the free abseil, as he hovered well-secured above the abyss, he muttered all the short prayers he had learned in his childhood. And what angered Franz the most: he kept his eyes tightly closed while abseiling. "Open your eyes!" he shouted. "Admire the panorama and the power of God!" And he held the safety rope firmly in his vice-like fists. "Loosen up, Franz, I'm suffocating!"

"Open your eyes, I said!" "I can't stand the view down. Please slacken the rope!" But Schroffenegger-Franz didn't let up until he got his way. Only when he saw the man looking up at him pleadingly with wide-open eyes, his pale face contorted into a grimace, did he let him slide down to the next stance. Now Franz could laugh again, and he said to his gentleman after he had followed: "An Our Father is no help at all against fear and dizziness! You have to look danger in the eye, sir. And a good remedy for dizziness is to rub your temples with chamois fat or, even better – stay down below!"