Summer is finally here. The thought of summer conjures up warm sunny days on the cliffs and long scrambling adventures in the high mountains. It’s the time to be outside, enjoying vacation days and having a good time. But it’s also the time of severe and frequent weather disturbances, with thunderstorms, tornados, and lightning disrupting your best-laid plans.
Lightning Kills Every Year
Severe thunderstorms, accompanied by lightning strikes and peals of rumbling thunder, are one of the biggest outdoor hazards encountered by climbers and mountaineers in the American mountains. Lightning kills over 100 people in the United States every year and over 300 more are injured. Victims are usually those who spend a lot of summer time outdoors—golfers, workers, fishermen, hikers, and sometimes climbers.
What is Lightning?
Lightning is an electrical charge that is generated by water molecules bumping together in high towering clouds. All this bumping fills the clouds with electrical charges, which eventually discharge between the clouds and the ground, between clouds, or within a cloud. Despite knowing the conditions needed for lightning to form, meteorologists debate how electrical charges build up and exactly how lighting forms. The charge is often felt ahead of time by tingling on your skin and your hair standing up from your scalp.
Lightning Loves High Places
When enough electricity builds within the clouds, it is discharged by lightning. Since air is a poor conductor of electricity, it is discharged through better conductors including rocks, trees, metal, and human bodies. Lightning seeks the path of least resistance and the shortest distance from cloud to ground, usually striking high points. Fortunately, over 90% of lightning strikes are cloud to cloud, with the remaining 10% being cloud to ground strikes. Lightning generates huge amounts of electricity, millions of volts, that dissipates almost instantly in heat and light. It’s enough electricity to kill you instantly. That’s why if you are a lover of high places, it is extremely important to get off summits, ridges, and cliffs when you’re climbing because lightning too is a lover of high places.
