Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire When you're on a mountain top and your hair does this...

...get your tail to shelter before you get fried.

These photos were taken back in '75. Shortly after this, the kid on the left was badly burned and the guy with the camera was dead.
Here's the story: FRIED BY LIGHTNING

Been there trying to keep my boat from blowing away during a thunderstorm on the Nevada side of Lake Mojave.
Noticed sparks jumping from my fingers to the bow rail and
hit the ground and rolled to a low spot just a second or two before lighting struck a small rise a few yards away.

Wow.

Happened to me and buddy on the divide in Colorado many years ago. We got away from our aluminum pack frames and laid down on the tundra an prayed a bit.

Perry

Was at a soccer game on a 800 acre turf farm that was as flat as a pancake and this started happening. I grabbed my wife and started calling for my son who was on the field to come to me. The coaches were starting to give me a WTF do you think you are doing, we are palying a game attitude when a bolt of lightning hit somewhere off in the distance, It was like the beach scene from Jaws, people runnung everywhere with some women panicking beyond belief.

In Idaho, many years ago, we thought it was funny to listen to the static electricity crackle in our gun barrels, out hunting jackrabbits. Not a lick of sense...

In 1957, lightning struck the radio antenna behind me, and the induction field (I'm not sure that that's the right term) drew every muscle in my body taut for an instant. 'Twasn't fun. Was very soon very glad that it was over with.

Glad you survived Ken, that sounds like a close call.


I suspect soiling one's Drawers is the outcome of the opposite of making one's muscles Taut, which was the effect ( almost) when Lightening hit a tree 50 or so yards from me while Skinning my son's first buck. I still have a chunk of bark blown off from the strike.


I about had my nose in the deers chest cavity and when I heard the sound, my first though was "shotgun blast" from a fellow hunter who was P-O'd when the rest of the crew agree'd that my son drew first blood, his shot was after the deer had stopped forward motion. The old codger was about to steal a 15 year old's deer by placing the coup-de-gras in the neck, until others mentioned my son's heart shot was the end of the deer's life even though he ran in front of this old guy before piling up. I honestly think he knew it may be his last chance to kill a deer while healthy enough to do so, and may not have known my son was the one who poked the hole in him first.


That was the closest I have come to the effects of lightnening, but once in the backwoods of Wyoming's bitterroot range I enjoyed a lightnening show that went on for 20+ minutes. Very amazing how the forest sounds when the band plays.

Allen

A story here in Oregon of two yound climbers on Three Fingered Jack. Rather than be happy with signing the mt top register one of the party was busy engraving his name and date into the aluminum containment system. The first bolt knocked them about, and guy two hustled down slope. A warning shot from God. Guy one insisted on continuing his engrazing and paid the ultimate price. Lightening can strike twice.

when I first started reading this thread I saw a flash and huge bang, Had to hit my building or the one next door.

An old pilot friend who kept a float plane in a lake behind his house in New Jersey was hit in the head by lighting - while sitting in the same chair on his dock - THREE TIMES. Nobody, including physicists from Princeton, can figure out how he lived through the first strike. After the first strike he moved the chair about fifty feet closer to shore, after the 2nd strike he figured tghat it was mathmatically impossible to get hit again, but moved the chair into the backyard at the very end of the dock.

He died at the age of 91, but was never again struck by lightning.


Terry

+1

On two occasions I have run hard for low ground off of a peak. One time was with my 15 year old son way above timberline. We sprinted 100 yards steeply down and cowered in a rock ravine under a gap roof formed by a huge slab of rock above us as a lightning storm passed over us. We put foam backpack pads under us and sat on them.

Feel bad for the kids in the photo. Amazing that they had no idea what that much static electricity meant.

As friends were bringing me home from the nursing home in Payson, they stopped to render aid and to direct traffic (cops and ambulance hadn't gotten there yet) where lightning had struck one biker and had knocked another unconscious.

The biker who'd been struck survived just long enough to die in the hospital in Show Low.

Lightning comprises two flashes � the big one downward from the sky and a little "greeter" from the ground upward. Apparently, when the group of bikers stopped by the side of the highway to wait for the thunder storm to pass, that one biker had the great misfortune to stand right where the ground "greeter" flash would pass up through his body and out the top of his head.

I wonder how many people have been killed by that old adage "lightning never strikes twice in the same place" because its entirely false. In fact, lightning often does strike in the same place. It strikes where there's the least resistance. If a particular rock pile has low electrical resistance, it'll be a lightning magnet.

A friend and I were fishing one afternoon on the St. Johns River and had a strange experience with an approaching thunderstorm approaching; we kept fishing like idiots. I made a cast, plug hit the water, but the monofilament line kind of levitated above the water like it was floating in the air and the boron rod I was fishing with was buzzing. Lightning never stuck, but there sure was a lot of static electricity in air. Wasn't long and we got the hell out of there. Never had anything like that happen since.

It's not entirely true that lightning always strikes the highest point. It's not uncommon for it to strike the ground not very far from an obviously higher point, such as a tree, because it's "looking for" the path of lowest electrical resistance, not the shortest physical distance.

I had lightning hit a fence post maybe 30 feet away from me when I was a teen.

It was really a weird feeling just before it happened.

I was haltering a nervous horse at the time.

Lightning hit a locus tree in my front yard twice. I saw the step leader hit the upward streamer the first time. Impressive. Killed the tree. About two weeks later I got home after a violent T-storm had passed and it was gone. Exploded into thousands of pieces.

Two years ago while hunting near Stanley, ID I ran across this result of a really lively day. The storm must have been in the early summer because none of the fires had spread more than 5 yards or so and most of the trees hadn't burned completely. There must have been well over 100 strikes inside of a few hundred yards of ridge top. It would have been hell on earth to have been there in person. Every brown tree you can see here was a strike and the ground was covered by burned sagebrush.