Me following the King Swing (pitch 17)

Figuring out how to follow the King Swing is one of those wonderful conundrums that could be a fun mental puzzle as a hypothetical scenario, but only a big wall can provide in real life. It's like the old puzzle about getting a fox, a chicken, and a bag of corn across a river with a boat that only holds one of them. How do you get your haul bags, your gear, and yourself across a completely blank span of granite to join your partner on the other side, using only two ropes, and without simply jumping off and swinging wildly (which would have catastrophic results for all involved.) If we'd had a third rope to use as a lower-out line, this situation would have been somewhat simpler, though still not trivial. But you may recall that we had decided not to bring a third rope, to avoid the excess weight and tangles. Before we had made that decision, we had thought through the King Swing very very carefully, as we knew that this would be the one place where not having a lower-out line would really complicate things. Only after we came up with a good solution did we decide to leave the lower-out line behind. Not having a third rope on this pitch did slow us down a bit, but it really wasn't too complicated.

When Aaron was ready to haul, I pulled in as much of the haul line as possible, and tied the pigs in short. Then I used the remaining part of the haul line to lower the pigs out... way out, and way down. But I kept my end of the haul line, rather than releasing it as I normally would have. Aaron then hauled the pigs, and once he had docked them to his anchor, he released his end of the haul line. I pulled the haul line back to my anchor, ran it through the chains, and set up to do a normal double-strand rappel with it. Meanwhile, I was still tied into the lead line, which ran down and around the corner, through Aaron's pro, and up to his anchor. I rappelled down the haul line to about the toe of Boot Flake, then pulled myself across with the lead line, essentially jumaring horizontally. When I was finally underneath Aaron, I began jumaring as usual (actually, I had to first descend a little ways to Eagle Ledge to retrieve the battery cover for Aaron's radio, which had fallen off and miraculously landed on the ledge.) Note that the one thing about this that was really inefficient was the fact that Aaron had to haul the entire pitch and dock the pigs before I could even start to follow, whereas normally these would happen simultaneously.

This photo shows me in the middle of this process, with the doubled haul line running back up to the top of Boot Flake, and the lead line running horizontally to the left as I pull myself across.