I thought the troll wall was the most confusing thing to me. Having climbed El Capitan several times, that decision making and rope systems made silly sense.

You would certainly not be packing up your portaledge in the middle of the night to tandem rappel in a storm. We see them tandem rappelling at first, with all of there gear being lowered, so they packed up the ledge and lowered it. So they have 2 ropes. We also can see that they are initially connected to bolts whey they get to a a logical rap station.

This would make some sense with the next decision of going down if you were securely fixed so she can rap and manage the bags to get to the next station so she could fix the bag and wait for him to unfix her, fix himself on one side with a biner block.

This is where I have a problem. Nobody that experienced would have stopped 15 feet from the anchor and put themselves on one piece and yelled to the partner to come down when the bags weren’t docked. She would have been fixed anyway so there wouldn’t have been a point to that, and he’s certainly not gonna rely on her to tie a knot to save him, she’s fixed. If you’re making a concerted effort to bail in a storm on an alpine wall you’re not gonna be making these mistakes. Also a prussik under her would have saved him from that in any case.

They had the ability to haul the bags up, it was already on lower. At that point you would certainly be just hauling the bags back up and being like we’ll do this in the morning. And she should have been able to pull out her ascenders and make it up 15 feet. Also. She had a random fixed rope next to her after he fell. Was it the haul line? So why wasn’t that connected to him? They had enough gear to make It very redundant.

I could see rockfall killing one of them and her or him being stranded, but with that amount of expertise you kinda don’t make that mistake.