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Lightning Over Short Hill Mountain

I was getting my butt thoroughly kicked. Ben Bressler, President of Natural Habitat Adventures and I were mountain biking on a steep singletrack hill climb up at Hall Ranch, near Boulder, Colorado. It was a beautiful sunny day and I was, umm, focusing. . . on not falling over and dying of a heart attack from being tragically out of shape. I didn’t notice the dark clouds rapidly forming over Long’s Peak on the horizon.

I kind of heard the thunder and I saw lightning flashes out of the corner of my eye, but I was too busy surviving the climb and finding the most efficient line on that the rocky trail to even think about doing something about it. Thank goodness Ben had the presence of mind to snap me out of my singular focus and deal or I would have just kept riding in a zone.

Ben Bressler,

We took refuge for a few minutes in a shallow hollow, among some bushes and a group of trees and watched the show as the unusually fast storm, with menacing lightning, thunder, and a dark squall line approached.

We did the calculations. At 5 seconds/mile, the thunder was a mile and half away. We were only a mile up the trail, and we figured we had just enough time to make a gonzo descent back down the trail and take refuge in the safety of the truck. Realizing our shallow gulley was not giving us nearly the protection we needed, a thunderclap we judged to be now just a mile away and the first drops of rain, were all the incentive we needed to bolt for the truck. We jumped on our bikes and made a wild descent with the storm licking at our heels, hopping rocks, dodging sheets of silvery rain, spurred on by deafening thunder that was just a few hundred yards off by now.

Back in the relative safety of the truck, we sat out a torrential downpour and major lightning, and passed the time exchanging stories of people we knew who hadn’t been so lucky with lightning. Within 15 minutes, in true Colorado fashion, the blue sky appeared, we got back on the trail, climbing for the second time that afternoon, none the worse. . .

The experience was another reminder of how capricious mother nature can be and how dynamic a mountain environment can be, and how pig headed and dumb we can sometimes be without a good partner to tell you you’re taking an unnecessary risk. You don’t want to mess with lightning. Check out this lightning safety decision tree and backcountry safety .pdf from the National Lightning Safety Institute.