On top of Boot Flake

As soon as Aaron reached the top of Boot Flake, we started preparing for the next pitch, one of the biggest events of the whole climb: the King Swing. This pitch involved an enormous pendulum to the left to get us into another crack system. Traditionally, it was usually done as two separate pendulums in succession, the first one huge, and the second one only slightly smaller. This relied on an old fixed piton, probably originally placed by Warren Harding himself on the first ascent, in the first crack to the left of the boot (visible in this picture). We had heard that the piton recently had pulled, or simply broke, and now the only way to break up the pendulum was to place a few tiny brass offset nuts in the first crack, and pray they didn't pop. The other alternative was to simply combine the two into one giant pendulum: the Emperor Swing.

We had debated who would get this pitch (on the one hand, both of us wanted it, but on the other hand, both of us were scared to death of it.) The way the chips fell, Aaron just sort of naturally ended up with it. As a trade-off, I got to lead the Great Roof later that day.

The next several photos show Aaron doing the Emperor Swing. There are a bunch of them, and I have many more that are not posted here, because this is without a doubt the most visually impressive feat of the whole climb, and is the photo opportunity of a lifetime. Aaron had given his parents instructions to be in the meadows early that morning just to get photos of this, and they ended up shooting a whole roll of film just on this pitch. If you skip some of these photos, at least check out the “compositions” that I pieced together, toward the end.