Aaron leading pitch 26 up to Camp VI

After I reached the Glowering Spot, Aaron led pitch 26, which started with an awkward and uncomfortable dihedral (shown here), which fortunately afforded pretty solid gear placements. Near the top of this section, he clipped a very bizarre piece of fixed gear: someone had left in the crack a complete cam head, with all four lobes and springs intact, but with the stem apparently cut off (as if with wire cutters!) Aaron girth-hitched a sling around it and moved on, calling down to me with laughter as he did. He quickly dispatched the second half of the pitch, involving relatively straightforward 5.8 free climbing, to arrive at Camp VI.

We had heard from many sources that Camp VI was a dirty, smelly pigsty, although according to recent accounts and topos, it had supposedly been cleaned up quite a bit in recent years. We found it to be relatively clean, but there was a fair bit of trash stuffed in the crack behind the ledge, and a slight smell of urine. All in all, it wasn't nearly as bad as we had anticipated.

I led the next pitch, the infamous Changing Corners. This pitch has a reputation for being one of the hardest aid pitches on the entire route, and interestingly it is also one of the two free-climbing cruxes. It is named for the fact that you start out ascending one corner (which is relatively easy to climb, free or aid), but then you do a few tricky moves to the right, around a sharp arête, into another corner, where the climbing becomes substantially harder. I have seen pictures of Lynn Hill free-climbing this section, and they absolutely amaze me. She did a completely baffling "Houdini move" to get around the arête, then climbed the more difficult corner using impossibly strange body position and tiny fingertip finger-locks.

I free climbed the initial easy twenty feet, then crack-jugged up the hand crack in the first of the two corners, doing a few free moves here and there to speed things up. To move around the arête, I clipped the second in a series of bolts, which required reaching far out to my right. I then slowly and carefully made my way up the second corner, using tiny nuts and one slider nut that I was grateful to have. Eventually the crack in this corner widened enough to take blue, then eventually green and yellow aliens, and I crack-jugged the rest of the way up to a hanging belay. Altogether, I think this pitch took me about an hour and a half, by far my slowest lead on the route, with the possible exception of the pitch 2-3 linkup below Sickle Ledge.