El Capitan, Free Rider. On September 21, Peter Janschek and I finished a free ascent of Free Rider. We swapped every lead. The leader redpointed every pitch. We did not pre-place any gear. The second also climbed every pitch free: I redpointed every pitch seconding, Peter red-pointed every pitch except one hard one and one easy one in which he slipped due to the wet crack. We first climbed the Freeblast, and had to wait two days because of bad weather. We then took three days to do the climb because we had terrible weather. The first day we got in a thunderstorm below The Block, so we had to rappel down to El Cap Spire. The next day the storm hit us below the roof of the Salathé, so we had to wait for the next day to continue. Although it took us quite a long time, we still believe that we did a correct free ascent of Free Rider.

Heinz Zak, Austria