July '96.
  1. El Cap free climbing with Jim Herson.  We reversed the East Ledges 
route, and worked on the Snake project on Saturday, recleaning the upper 
corner, and placing a couple of bolts in the crux blank corner.  That 
evening we hiked up to sleep atop the Salathe' Wall (I wandered for 
awhile in the dark finding this).
  On Sunday we rappelled down to work on free climbing the headwall 
pitches.  This was Jim's project, which he ultimately redpointed in 
October.  He toproped the Roof pitch, seeming to have trouble only with 
the last move, where he had to pluck one of Thomas Huber's fixed 
PowerBars from the crack to get a decent hold.  Jim led the main crack 
pitch with just a couple of hangs.  Thanks to his encouragement, and 
Thomas' chalked tick marks by the good jams, I was able to free most of 
the hand size portion of this pitch, with some batmanning when it got 
too hard, and then a healthy bit of jumaring on the upper part.  I also 
had fun following the knobs pitch left of Long Ledge, yarding on every 
quickdraw, but finding reasonable moves elsewhere.