Hiker struck by lightning on summit

upi ^ | Aug. 6, 2010

[TexasRepublic]

Baker has now taken the nickename “Flash”.

But his girlfriend calls him Sparky.

[dfwgator]

[Grammy]

Mr G climbed to the top of Grand Teton. They did it in 2 days, camping overnight at a saddle, so they could start the hard ascent at 3 am. They wanted to be at the top and back down by noon to avoid any possibility of storms.

Mr G’s brother saw someone killed by lightning on a mountain.

[reagan_fanatic]

LOL - beat me to it.

[Does so]

"...The really scary thing is that lightning can jump from a storm cloud as much as six miles to another peak..."

I'm presently sitting in the same place where, two years ago, lightning struck a tree just 20 feet away. A thunderstorm had passed through ½-hour earlier. The tree it struck was a paper birch tree.

How I found the tree it struck was easy: The bolt had sliced through one side of the birch, which sent thin "ringlets" of paper birch everywhere. Most "ringlets" hung in the branches of other trees—for 50-feet around—never having reached the soil.

[TigersEye]

That's wild. Lightning does some crazy things. A number of years ago lightning struck about 10 ft away from where I'm now sitting. I saw the ball of light on the ground outside the window. Fried my modem. The rest of the computer and telephone were OK.

A plumber told me what he had found in a summer cabin near here. Lightning had un-soldered every copper fitting in the house's plumbing while fully charged with water. It is almost impossible to un-solder a copper pipe joint with a torch if there is water in it.