  Since February 1997 the BL Lac object Mkn 501 is in a ``high state'' of
gamma-ray emission. The HEGRA collaboration has studied Mkn 501 with their air
Cherenkov telescopes on La Palma. Here we report on observations with the 5 m^2
telescope (threshold approx. 1.5 TeV) operated in a stand alone mode. We
observed a rapidly varying flux between 0.5 to 6 times of that from the Crab
Nebula. On average an integral flux above 1.5 TeV of (2 + 1.3 - 0.5) x 10^-11
cm^-2 s^-1 has been determined. The spectrum extends at least up to 10 TeV with
an integral power law coefficient of 1.8 +- 0.2 and seems to be steeper than in
1996.
