A lifelong hiker, climber and outdoorsman in general, thankfully the vigilance demanded traveling through rough and steep terrain coupled with that required to navigate other naturally occurring dangers, in particular the considerable risk of death or injury posed by lightning, was drummed into me in early childhood. There are about 2,000 deaths a year worldwide and about 25 on average in Canada. We are all of course periodically guilty of letting our guards down. Roadside tenting at the top of an isolated and barely drivable back roads mountain pass at about 3,000 metres above sea level in the Spanish Pyrenees was not the place to do so. Neither was it advisable hiking high in the Canadian Rockies. Much closer to home and in the middle quite literally of a dark and extremely stormy night, was a further brush with nature’s electrical wrath (300 million volts give or take and about 30,000 amps * ) this time at sea level sleeping aboard our thirty foot catamaran sailboat moored at Snug Cove, Bowen Island in Howe Sound near Vancouver, Canada.
Domiciled in England at the time a year prior to immigrating to Canada in 1967, touring continental Europe with a girlfriend we had a close brush with lightning. It was a first such experience for both of us and in the innocence of relative youth, a very scary one. We were on a camping trip since neither of us had any serious money for hotels. We had a two person minimalist mountain tent for accommodation and for transportation a brand new, Austin Mini. It was the commercial van variant the cheapest of the cheap interestingly on which, unlike the sedan version, no government sales tax was payable albeit for obtuse reasons. I wasn’t going to argue.
As stated, at about 3,000 metres and thus well above tree line, we were driving over the summit of a remote mountain pass in the Spanish Pyrenees in clear mid-summer weather. Enamored with the grandiose scenery and isolated some considerable distance from the nearest town, having reached the summit late in the day, impulsively we decided to pitch our tent for the night on the heath as it were right there and then. Other traffic was virtually non-existent. We felt like we were in our own private alpine nirvana.
We pitched the tent on grass about fifty feet from the car. Barely big enough for two people, it was by design higher at the front than the back, the front being supported by an external aluminum bi-pole ‘A’ frame arrangement. This allowed for more room to move at the entrance than would a conventional internal single pole. Aluminum being second only to copper in its electrical conductivity, the design almost invited any passing electrical current to visit. A potentially 300 million volt, 30,000 amps direct lightning strike would for sure be welcomed like royalty by the dual poles and shared immediately with us two ‘innocents abroad’ so to speak. So what? The sky was mostly clear with no anvil shaped cumulonimbus electrical storm oriented clouds extant, or looming on the horizon.
Tired from a long day on the road we crashed as dusk turned to night. About an hour later we were awakened. Guess what? By thunder. Lots of it. ‘Weather changes quickly in the mountains’ is certainly a truism. There can be no thunder without lightning the latter being the source of the thunderclaps. Sound travels a mile in about five seconds. Count the seconds between the flash of lightning and the thunder to know how close the lightning is. If in fact they occur almost simultaneously, the lightning and thus the danger is right over your head! At first we were fifteen seconds or three miles in the clear however the storm we soon deduced, was headed our way and fast. My thoughts turned to the shiny, externally exposed aluminum tent poles. If lightning struck the poles, surely we would literally be toast!
We debated what to do. Running to the car would make both of us potential lightning targets en-route. Our bodies might offer more electrical resistance than the aluminum but at what cost? It didn’t bear thinking about. On the other hand, remaining in the tent inches away from the shiny front support contraption would invite and likely ensure our demise should lightning strike it. We agreed making a run for the car was the better of the two options open to us. Assuming we made it that far, we figured the tires just might protect us some should the car take a hit hence arguably, being in it was the lesser of the only two options. These days it is felt a car’s metal not the tires plays the biggest part in protection by spreading the lightning over the skin of the vehicle. Airliners with their aluminum skinned hulls and wings are often hit by lightning and are indeed protected by the same mechanism known as a Faraday cage. Those inside the cage are protected.
The lightning flash to the sound of thunder time interval count, was down to barely five seconds — one mile away with the thunder by then deafening. We shot out of the blocks so to speak. In the minute or so it took to reach the car we went from rather damp to utterly soaked. We dried off, put on fresh clothes (none of this easy inside a loaded up Mini van) and once the storm had moved on, rather than return to the tent we played safe and fell asleep — also not easy in the back of the Brit’s idea of a viable, payload carrying albeit diminutive commercial vehicle. We had gotten away with one and so, as it turned out, did the aluminum poled mountain tent.
Located one province east of British Columbia in Alberta’s Jasper National Park at a base station elevation of 1060 metres, the Jasper Skytram is an aerial tramway on The Whistlers, the mountain being so named after ‘whistlers’, as in the local Hoary marmots which whistle to warn each other of danger. German built and completed in 1964, the tram is the highest and longest aerial tramway in Canada. Traveling at six metres per second, it rises to an upper station height of 2,263 metres with a travel time of seven minutes. The short hike from the upper lift station to the summit involves an elevation gain of just over 200 metres.
Visiting Jasper one hot and sunny summer’s day, my wife and I decided, more or less on a whim, that we would take the Skytram. We would then take the short and easy hike in the alpine area from the upper terminal to the summit. In bright mid-summer sunshine we set out immediately on exiting the tram.
Weather as noted above often changes very quickly in the mountains and it did. We soon noticed there were no people behind us outbound on the trail and many of the people ahead of us were turning back. The sun quickly disappeared as a wall of rapidly darkening clouds materialised moving towards us at considerable speed. We increased our pace determined to reach the summit and make it back to the lodge before the oncoming storm reached and enveloped us.
Very soon all of the people ahead of us had turned back. We soldiered on the sky getting blacker by the minute. We were very quickly soaked by the strong wind driven rain mixed with hail. Ahead lightning flashes appeared between us and the peak. Reluctantly we turned back and soon realised that most people had already made it back to the lodge with just a few stragglers still running towards and closing in on it. Within minutes the storm had overtaken us and forked lightning surrounded us.
We were isolated and in a very vulnerable situation. We knew we were sitting ducks for a lightning strike. We started to run. Atypically for hiking, my wife was wearing her much loved Birkenstock sandals. Why not? It was a warm and sunny summer day when we boarded the tram and the anticipated hike was both short and presented a minimalist elevation gain. A piece of cake. At least that was the thinking when we were in the valley below with no clouds then on the horizon.
Completely overtaken by the storm we could barely make out the lodge in the fast reducing visibility. By then all the other hikers were inside the relative safety of the lodge. In our unwitting isolation we were in serious danger of being struck by lightning and or of developing hypothermia as we were soaked to the skin, the temperature had plummeted and the wind had strengthened to close to gale force. Not to put too fine a point on it, there was certainly an urgent need for increased speed towards the lodge. We were scared and then some.
This is where the sandals came into the picture big time. It is virtually impossible to run fast over rough terrain in sandals be they Birkenstocks or other common or garden varieties. Realising the magnitude of this unanticipated impediment which conceivably as our situation worsened might well have cost us our lives, I grabbed my wife’s hand as tight as I could and went into overdrive. That incipient death inspired grip, along with our raw fears, enabled us to keep each other upright and moving fast in spite of numerous stumbles by both of us.
The lodge almost disappeared from view as visibility dropped to perhaps 300 metres however we and the lodge were on a ridge which averaged perhaps fifty metres across with steep drop offs on both sides. We had no trouble seeing both edges of the ridge so just kept mid-ridge so to speak and booted it.
Unbeknownst to us of course, most everybody inside the lodge was watching our every step convinced, they were later to tell us, that they were witnessing our probable demise felled by myriad lightning delivered volts. Miraculously we both made it safely to the lodge unharmed albeit with both of us on the edge of hypothermia.
We and all the other tourists were to spend the next four hours or so in that high mountain lodge as the winds were too strong for safe operation of the tram. We were all on arrival quickly wrapped in blankets, from long experience permanently kept to hand by the staff to aid tourists’ recovery from incipient or actual hypothermia and in our case, likely also from a brush with violent deaths. Eventually the winds decreased to the point that we could all be evacuated off the mountain in the tram. All was well that ended well.
Not content with at that point two attempts on me and one on my wife, nature had another potential lightning strike in store for us. Asleep aboard our thirty foot catamaran sailboat moored at our home marina in Snug Cove, Bowen Island in Howe Sound near Vancouver BC, some of the loudest thunder claps either of us had ever heard awakened us with a start shortly after midnight. The thunder we awoke to was right overhead as were lightning bolts. We were at the centre of the maelstrom. As if this was not bad enough, the tall and reflective mast on the boat was aluminum and about a thousand times or more the mass of the mountain tent’s small external poles! I took some solace from the fact that it was located forward and in-between the two wooden hulls of the cat, the starboard one of which being the one in which we had been sleeping.
Should we run to the car or should we not was a difficult call, for me for the second time. Since the car was a considerable distance away we opted for a Hobson’s choice solution. We stayed put figuring that to be the lesser of two evils. The boat was 30 feet long and 20 feet wide. Thus the mast, located forward, was about 10 feet from each of the two hulls. However, it was ‘stepped’ on a large diameter steel tube which reached into and was bolted to, each hull. We had only recently bought the boat and I had no idea if the mast was grounded in any way. (It wasn’t!). In sailing areas where thunder storms are common typically they are. We get relatively few on the BC coast.
There was no question of going back to sleep right away since the storm seemed to get hung up in the local area which is literally a sheltered cove and electrical storms aside, is normally a very snug and protected one hence its name. It seemed to be giving shelter to the storm not to us as thunder and lightning continued for a very long time. It was too noisy to sleep and too scary to relax. There was no sense in going on deck so we stayed below and eventually, as the storm slowly subsided, we drifted back to sleep.
After three close go arounds I thought perhaps I might be done playing with lightning. Not quite. Some months ago while I was asleep in bed and my wife just on the cusp of so doing, again I awoke with a start to lightning, this time accompanied by a particularly violent cacophony of thunder it’s crashes and bangs not unlike one might surmise, those of a symphony orchestra timpanist gone mad. We have two large skylights in the roof to both and to the windows, we gave a very wide berth. All right, I hid under the covers OK?
* (https://www.weather.gov > safety > lighting-power How Powerful Is Lightning? – National Weather Service)