[4] In the summer of 1910 he surveyed the Purcell Mountains and in 1911 he explored the Banff area, making a number of first ascents already.

He guided de:Albert MacCarthy and William Wasbrough Foster over the northeast face by hacking hundreds of steps and famously told his clients at the top "Gentlemen, that's so far as I can take you."

During the ascent, Kain was under the assumption that Mount Robson had been climbed in 1909 by George Kinney and Curly Phillips, but on their return to the campsite at Robson Pass, Phillips, who was outfitter of the expedition, revealed that he and Kinney had actually fallen short of reaching the summit in their heroic effort over the west face four years before.

He fell ill in October of that year in Wilmer, British Columbia, and died six months later of encephalitis in a hospital in Cranbrook.

Kain wrote an autobiography titled Where the Clouds Can Go where he describes his tough years while growing up in Austria as well as his 25 years working variously as a guide for The Alpine Club of Canada, a hunter outfitter, and an assistant to Arthur O. Wheeler for the Geographic Survey of Canada.

In New Zealand there is also a Mount Conrad (2,598 m) named after him, lying in the Liebig Range above the Murchison Glacier in the Southern Alps.