Me leading pitch 18

Due to our late start, and because the King Swing took a long time (as we had expected), we were running a little behind. So once the King Swing was completely behind us, I took off up pitch 18, planning to link it with half of pitch 19 to save time. Aaron would then link the rest of pitch 19 with pitch 20, bringing us to Camp IV. I free-climbed the first part of pitch 18, then started crack-jugging when the climbing got more difficult. At the top of pitch 18, I continued climbing, until I reached an anchor for a short pendulum to the left. I was amazed to find four carabiners and two sewn slings clipped to this anchor in some sort of bizarre configuration. I shouted my usual booty victory cry, took the four biners and one of the slings (leaving behind the second, an old ratty one) and called down to Aaron to lower me out for the pendulum. It turned out to be an easy one, more of a tension traverse really, and at the end of it, I found myself at a set of bolts.

As I hauled, Aaron jumared up, and when he got to the pendulum point, he lowered himself out on a bight, in the usual way. Just as he reached the anchor, he realized that this was probably a mistake. The rope was pretty kinked, and he was lowering directly from a chain, so the bight probably wouldn't pull through when he needed to retrieve it. This was smart thinking; if he hadn't realized this, and the rope had gotten stuck, it could have put us in a very tricky position. Unfortunately, it meant that he had to jumar back up to the pendulum point to fix the problem, but he was jumaring with a 4:1 advantage. With every stroke, he would make only a few inches of progress. This little tiny mistake, and such a simple one to make, ended up wasting some time. When Aaron finally finished the pitch, he was pretty frustrated about it, and really worn out from the jugging.