  An RF ion-funnel technique has been developed to extract ions from a
high-pressure (10 bar) noble-gas environment into vacuum ($10^{-6}$ mbar).
Detailed simulations have been performed and a prototype has been developed for
the purpose of extracting $^{136}$Ba ions from Xe gas with high efficiency.
With this prototype, ions have been extracted for the first time from
high-pressure xenon gas and argon gas. Systematic studies have been carried out
and compared to the simulations. This demonstration of extraction of ions with
mass comparable to that of the gas generating the high-pressure into vacuum has
applications to Ba tagging from a Xe-gas time-projection chamber (TPC) for
double beta decay as well as to the general problem of recovering trace amounts
of an ionized element in a heavy (m$>40$ u) carrier gas.
