Me hauling the Great Roof pitch

The hauling on this pitch was pleasantly easy. Aaron had to lower out the bags quite a ways, of course, but there was plenty of line left with which to do so. At one point while I was hauling and Aaron was following, we heard a loud crack underneath us, and looked down to see a small object falling. It hit the rock below us a second time, broke apart, and we watched in silent fear as the pieces plummeted to the earth.

“Shit!” I thought, “What was that?” I looked down at my gear to see if something might have come unclipped.

Echoing my thoughts, Aaron yelled, “What the hell was that? Your radio?”

I checked the rack, my radio, my water bottle, and the rest of my gear, not to mention the pigs and all the stuff hanging from them, but I couldn't find anything amiss. “I don't know man. My radio's fine,” I replied, “Everything seems to be here. Could it have been a cam?” I inspected the rack more thoroughly, but all the cams appeared to be there.

“It didn't look like a cam. And it sounded like plastic, but it's hard to tell,” Aaron answered. We were worried about this, but we figured if we had dropped something, we'd discover it eventually. We only hoped that it wouldn't turn out to be something vital.

Somehow it didn't occur to us (at least, not to me) at that moment that it might have been something dropped by a party above us. In retrospect, however, I have realized that this must have been the case. At the end of the whole trip, none of our gear was missing, not even a single nut or sling. The Brendons were a day ahead of us, so they should have been nearing the summit at that moment, and they had a pair of yellow radios. I could swear that, at least in my memory, in that brief glimpse that I caught of the object as it fell, it was yellow, or some light color like that.