In reply to 1poundSOCKS:
http://www.yosemitebigwall.com/salathe
As this topo shows, Freerider and Salathé Wall share common ground for most of their height, only differing at the Monster Offwidth [which also seems to be used on the majority of free ascents of the Salathé] and about four pitches up the left side of the Salathé Headwall. Apart from three specific traversing pitches - Heart to Lung, Hollow Flake, traverse under roof to Roundtable - the climbing is fairly straight up with only minor sideways manoeuvres; the couple of pitches at the top of the Freeblast section are still fairly low-angle and follow a ramp system, while the diagonal bit after Lung Ledge is mostly scrambling up the rising continuation of that ledge.
There's a bolted descent route straight to the ground from Heart Ledges which nowadays is often semi-permanently equipped with fixed ropes. It's quite common when climbing Salathé/Freerider - or possibly any of the routes that visit Heart Ledges - to do the lower section unencumbered and haul up the descent route, in either order. [In the days before fixed ropes one simply needed to carry two or three extra to fix the five ropelengths to the ground, then drop them off on the way back up for third party collection.] Anybody doing a particularly fast ascent is obviously unlikely to be hauling.
News just in: Pete Whittaker has become the first person to make an all-free solo ascent of El Capitan in a day, using rope solo techniques. Pete climbed the classic 37-pitch Freerider 5.12d in just 20 hours and 6 minutes. Only two previous attempts to rope solo El Capitan 'all-free' have ever been made, the records via Freerider standing at 7 days and 4 days by Stéphane Perron and Jorg Verhoeven respectively.
