Why lightning is so terrifying on California's highest peaks

Jack Dolan, Tribune News Service

Megan Eskew did everything right before she climbed Mt. Whitney last month. She got in top physical shape, carefully checked the weather and, noticing a chance of thunderstorms, heeded expert advice to start very early — a few minutes after midnight. Moving quickly up the 11-mile trail, she climbed out of the trees and onto bare granite — which conducts electricity — long before sunrise. She reached the 14,500-foot summit at 7:45 am and, after snapping a few photos, hightailed it down. She knew she had to get back to the safety of the trees before the thunder and lightning struck.

Then she felt a sprinkle. "Before you could even process the thought, 'Oh, that's rain,' thunder boomed," Eskew said. She picked up the pace, and then the thunder — which sounds like artillery at that altitude, where you're essentially inside the storm — boomed again. Everyone around her started running downhill, so Eskew ran too.

"The storm just didn't let up," she said. It got so cold that the wind-driven rain turned to hail and started pelting her from behind, stinging her neck and ears. But what worried her most, as she raced for the trees still thousands of feet below, was lightning. At that altitude, the bolts don't just come down in single strikes; they can surround a hiker. Hair can suddenly stand on end, metal hiking poles can start to buzz, and a direct hit can be fatal. "I have three little kids, and I just kept picturing their little faces," Eskew said days later, still shaken by the experience. She remembers telling herself over and over, "Keep running, you cannot be the idiot who dies up here today."

As a late-summer monsoon spread across California in recent weeks, it delivered hundreds of thousands of lightning strikes — record numbers in August and the first week of September. Those sparked hundreds of wildfires and, for many hikers, sheer terror. While emergency responders were focused on controlling the flames at lower elevations, thousands of climbers, backpackers and other mountain enthusiasts played a dangerous game of cat and mouse with storms on the state's storied summits. This summer in California, there have been no reports of death by lightning. The odds of getting struck in the US are less than 1 in a million in any given year, according to the National Weather Service, and about 1 in 18,000 over a lifetime. Surprisingly, 90% of lightning strike victims survive. In recent years, California has averaged about one lightning-related death per year, often linked to outdoor recreation such as hiking and camping, said Lindsey Stine, spokesperson for the Inyo County Sheriff's Office.

Those statistics might seem reassuring, but fully trusting them is hard, especially when one is hiking in mountains so high they create their own weather. Storms can brew up with terrifying speed and anyone caught above tree line is going to feel dangerously close to the action. At sea level, a thunderstorm can be 12,000 feet above you, even if the clouds are directly overhead. That's more than two miles away.

But on the Sierra Nevada's highest peaks and passes, including the upper reaches of Mt. Whitney — the tallest mountain in the United States outside of Alaska — hikers are literally inside such a storm, with nowhere to hide. The threat is most severe on summits and on long, high ridges, where no trees grow and there's a good chance a hiker is the tallest thing on the landscape — like a human lightning rod. Up there, the obvious place to seek shelter is under a rock, but that's not a great idea because lightning can electrify granite — especially wet granite. In September 2023, seemingly innocuous clouds turned into a sudden electrical storm on the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. That's among the worst places to get caught because the final 400 feet of the climb are so steep the only way up and down is to inch along the nearly vertical face clinging to a pair of solid steel cables drilled into the rock.

As often happens in a storm, almost everyone on the summit that day scrambled for the cables at once, creating a nightmarish traffic jam. One woman fell during the chaos, landing on a ledge on the north side of the dome, where she would eventually have to be rescued by helicopter. To avoid the melee on the cables, five climbers sought shelter in a cramped granite cave at the summit. They hadn't been inside long when it took two direct hits from lightning, knocking one occupant unconscious and badly shocking two others. One had scars on his head and a foot, where a lightning bolt apparently entered and exited his body.

But at least everyone survived. In 1985, another group of hikers who took shelter in the same cave during a lightning storm were not so lucky. Three were seriously injured, one died from electrocution, and another convulsed so violently after being struck by lightning that he tumbled out of the cave and fell to his death from the 8,839-foot precipice. In July 1990, a similar tragedy unfolded on Mt. Whitney. Jim MacLeod, 24, his older brother Glen and a friend had climbed the challenging mountaineer's route, which ascends the east face. That meant they couldn't see the dangerous clouds approaching from the west until they were a few feet from the top.

By then, the storm had grown so fierce that they had no choice but to race to a crude stone and metal hut on the summit. When they opened the door, they found 10 other hikers already crammed inside. They squeezed in and sat shoulder to shoulder with the others on the floor. MacLeod was jammed against a potbellied stove with a metal chimney that stuck out through the roof, making it the highest point in the Lower 48 states. The hikers in the hut were all trying to reassure one another that the thunder was far away, MacLeod said, "when all of a sudden, kaboom!" A massive bolt struck the metal chimney, raced down the pipe and tore into MacLeod's right shoulder. "Remember when you were a kid and got hit in the head with a baseball or something and saw stars?" MacLeod asked during a recent interview.

He was unconscious for about 20 minutes, he said, and groggily awoke to what sounded like chanting: "One, two, three, four, five" — long breath — "one, two, three, four, five." As his senses cleared, he realized it was the sound of people performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He panicked, at first, fearing they were working on him. But when he came around a bit more, he saw they were desperately trying to revive Matthew Nordbrock, 26, who had been sitting next to him. While MacLeod's body was ravaged — he had an enormous gash in his right shoulder where the lightning entered and a gaping hole in his back where it exited — Nordbrock barely had a scratch. The autopsy would describe Nordbrock's burns as "unremarkable," MacLeod said. Nordbrock had a small mark on his arm, "where it had been touching my shin," MacLeod said, but no other signs of trauma.

Later, a cardiologist explained that life or death can depend on the precise point in the heartbeat when electricity enters the body. "It hit your heart at the right moment and hit his heart at the wrong moment," MacLeod was told. The tragedy inspired the U.S. Forest Service to post signs on the trail warning of "Extreme Danger From Lightning." The signs inform hikers that the shelter at the summit won't protect them and advises them to descend "immediately" if they see dark clouds or hear "hissing in the air."