Megan Eskew did every little thing proper earlier than she climbed Mt. Whitney final month. She acquired in high bodily form, fastidiously checked the climate and, noticing an opportunity of thunderstorms, heeded skilled recommendation to begin very early — a couple of minutes after midnight.
Shifting rapidly up the 11-mile path, she climbed out of the bushes and onto naked granite — which conducts electrical energy — lengthy earlier than dawn. She reached the 14,500-foot summit at 7:45 a.m. and, after snapping a number of photographs, hightailed it down. She knew she needed to get again to the protection of the bushes earlier than the thunder and lightning struck.
Then she felt a sprinkle.
“Before you could even process the thought, ‘Oh, that’s rain,’ thunder boomed,” Eskew stated. She picked up the tempo, after which the thunder — which appears like artillery at that altitude, the place you’re basically contained in the storm — boomed once more.
Everybody round her began working downhill, so Eskew ran too.
“The storm just didn’t let up,” she stated.
It acquired so chilly that the wind-driven rain turned to hail and began pelting her from behind, stinging her neck and ears. However what fearful her most, as she raced for the bushes nonetheless 1000’s of ft under, was lightning.
At that altitude, the bolts don’t simply come down in single strikes; they will encompass a hiker. Hair can all of the sudden stand on finish, steel climbing poles can begin to buzz, and a direct hit could be deadly.
“I have three little kids, and I just kept picturing their little faces,” Eskew stated days later, nonetheless shaken by the expertise. She remembers telling herself again and again, “Keep running, you cannot be the idiot who dies up here today.”
Megan Eskew, 38, on the Park at River Stroll on Sept. 11, 2025, in Bakersfield.
(Adam Perez/For The Instances)
As a late-summer monsoon unfold throughout California in current weeks, it delivered lots of of 1000’s of lightning strikes — file numbers in August and the primary week of September. These sparked lots of of wildfires and, for a lot of hikers, sheer terror.
Whereas emergency responders had been centered on controlling the flames at decrease elevations, 1000’s of climbers, backpackers and different mountain fanatics performed a harmful recreation of cat and mouse with storms on the state’s storied summits.
This summer season in California, there have been no reviews of demise by lightning. The percentages of getting struck within the U.S. are lower than 1 in one million in any given 12 months, in response to the Nationwide Climate Service, and about 1 in 18,000 over a lifetime. Surprisingly, 90% of lightning strike victims survive.
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When lightning strikes and there’s nowhere to cover
In recent times, California has averaged about one lightning-related demise per 12 months, usually linked to outside recreation equivalent to climbing and tenting, stated Lindsey Stine, spokesperson for the Inyo County Sheriff’s Workplace.
These statistics might sound reassuring, however absolutely trusting them is difficult, particularly when one is climbing in mountains so excessive they create their very own climate. Storms can brew up with terrifying velocity and anybody caught above tree line goes to really feel dangerously near the motion.
At sea degree, a thunderstorm could be 12,000 ft above you, even when the clouds are immediately overhead. That’s greater than two miles away.
However on the Sierra Nevada’s highest peaks and passes, together with the higher reaches of Mt. Whitney — the tallest mountain in the US outdoors of Alaska — hikers are actually inside such a storm, with nowhere to cover.
The menace is most extreme on summits and on lengthy, excessive ridges, the place no bushes develop and there’s a very good likelihood a hiker is the tallest factor on the panorama — like a human lightning rod.
Up there, the apparent place to hunt shelter is underneath a rock, however that’s not a terrific concept as a result of lightning can electrify granite — particularly moist granite.
In September 2023, seemingly innocuous clouds was a sudden electrical storm on the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite Nationwide Park. That’s among the many worst locations to get caught as a result of the ultimate 400 ft of the climb are so steep the one manner up and down is to inch alongside the almost vertical face clinging to a pair of stable metal cables drilled into the rock.
As usually occurs in a storm, nearly everybody on the summit that day scrambled for the cables without delay, making a nightmarish site visitors jam. One lady fell through the chaos, touchdown on a ledge on the north facet of the dome, the place she would finally must be rescued by helicopter.
To keep away from the melee on the cables, 5 climbers sought shelter in a cramped granite cave on the summit. They hadn’t been inside lengthy when it took two direct hits from lightning, knocking one occupant unconscious and badly stunning two others. One had scars on his head and a foot, the place a lightning bolt apparently entered and exited his physique.
However not less than everybody survived.
In 1985, one other group of hikers who took shelter in the identical cave throughout a lightning storm weren’t so fortunate. Three had been significantly injured, one died from electrocution, and one other convulsed so violently after being struck by lightning that he tumbled out of the cave and fell to his demise from the 8,839-foot precipice.
In July 1990, an identical tragedy unfolded on Mt. Whitney.
Jim MacLeod, 24, his older brother Glen and a pal had climbed the difficult mountaineer’s route, which ascends the east face. That meant they couldn’t see the harmful clouds approaching from the west till they had been a number of ft from the highest.
By then, the storm had grown so fierce that they’d no selection however to race to a crude stone and steel hut on the summit. Once they opened the door, they discovered 10 different hikers already crammed inside.
They squeezed in and sat shoulder to shoulder with the others on the ground. MacLeod was jammed towards a potbellied range with a steel chimney that caught out by means of the roof, making it the very best level within the Decrease 48 states.
The hikers within the hut had been all making an attempt to reassure each other that the thunder was distant, MacLeod stated, “when all of a sudden, kaboom!”
Jim MacLeod was struck by lighting in July 1990.
(Kathleen MacLeod)
A large bolt struck the steel chimney, raced down the pipe and tore into MacLeod’s proper shoulder. “Remember when you were a kid and got hit in the head with a baseball or something and saw stars?” MacLeod requested throughout a current interview.
He was unconscious for about 20 minutes, he stated, and groggily awoke to what gave the impression of chanting: “One, two, three, four, five” — lengthy breath — “one, two, three, four, five.”
As his senses cleared, he realized it was the sound of individuals performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He panicked, at first, fearing they had been engaged on him. However when he got here round a bit extra, he noticed they had been desperately making an attempt to revive Matthew Nordbrock, 26, who had been sitting subsequent to him.
Jim MacLeod of Lengthy Seaside holds a jacket on Sept. 11, 2025, exhibiting entry and exit holes the place he was struck by lighting in a constructing atop Mt. Whitney 10 years in the past.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Instances)
Whereas MacLeod’s physique was ravaged — he had an unlimited gash in his proper shoulder the place the lightning entered and a gaping gap in his again the place it exited — Nordbrock barely had a scratch.
The post-mortem would describe Nordbrock’s burns as “unremarkable,” MacLeod stated. Nordbrock had a small mark on his arm, “where it had been touching my shin,” MacLeod stated, however no different indicators of trauma.
Later, a heart specialist defined that life or demise can rely on the exact level within the heartbeat when electrical energy enters the physique. “It hit your heart at the right moment and hit his heart at the wrong moment,” MacLeod was advised.
The tragedy impressed the U.S. Forest Service to put up indicators on the path warning of “Extreme Danger From Lightning.” The indicators inform hikers that the shelter on the summit received’t shield them and advises them to descend “immediately” in the event that they see darkish clouds or hear “hissing in the air.”
Regardless of the dangers, a gentle line of weary, storm-battered hikers shuffled down from the Excessive Sierra on the Mt. Whitney trailhead simply outdoors Lone Pine early this month. Many had spent weeks alongside the John Muir Path, a 200-mile traverse by means of a few of the most rugged and spectacular excessive alpine terrain in the US.
Adam Habel stated he and his climbing associate, Connor Newton, had spent a lot of the journey tenting just under the tree line, protecting an in depth eye on the clouds and ready for one of the best alternative, normally within the very early morning, to enterprise up and over uncovered mountain passes.
The day they crossed Mather Cross, at 12,000 ft, they had been “wet and cold from the minute we started hiking, with loud thunder in the distance,” Habel stated.
Rising up in mountainous Kalispell, Mont., Habel, 27, stated, he discovered to learn clouds at an early age. It normally comes down to paint. “A dark, thick cloud is more angry. A lighter, fluffier cloud is generally not going to do much,” he stated.
He was shocked by the diploma of confidence many hikers appeared to put in climate forecasts they noticed on their telephones. If it stated rain at 2 p.m., they’d cheerfully head up an uncovered go at 11:30 a.m. though there have been “very angry-looking clouds” throughout them.
A forecast provides a very good indicator of what to anticipate however not a superbly dependable schedule you may wager your life on. “That’s just not how weather works,” Habel stated with a chuckle.
Eskew had been protecting an in depth eye on the forecast throughout her climb. It predicted afternoon storms, she stated, however they arrived manner forward of schedule.
“It was crazy how quickly the weather turned and how it didn’t do what the forecast predicted,” she stated.
Her frantic run all the way down to the tree line, which lined a number of miles and about 2,000 vertical ft, took not less than an hour. “That is a very long time to be scared for your life,” she stated.
When she and her associates acquired to the protection of the bushes — it needs to be a gaggle of bushes of comparable top; a single tree, or a really tall tree, can act as a lightning rod — they had been “soaked to the bone” and shaken to the core, she stated.
Looking back, she doesn’t suppose their lives had been really at risk. “But in the moment, it was pretty horrifying,” she stated.
If she had the selection to make once more, she would name off the hike as quickly as she noticed storms within the forecast. That’s not a simple choice, as a result of permits to hike Mt. Whitney are in extraordinarily excessive demand. There’s a lottery system that greater than 100,000 folks apply for every year, and solely a few third get permits. So you may’t simply reschedule.
However sitting out a 12 months, or extra, would have been the appropriate name.
“We didn’t enjoy the hike. The entire way up was in the pitch black, and the entire way down we were running for our lives,” she stated. “It wasn’t worth it.”
