While hunting in Colorado this past week, we spent a considerable amount of time in the high country. How high? Many of the hunts took place between 11,000 and 12,000 feet. That’s the nosebleed section and also the Excedrin migraine zone. I never did get too dizzy, but I was huffing and puffing like the big, bad wolf.
While cruising through an avalanche chute, it dawned on me it was the same area where several years back my cameraman and I were engulfed in a severe mountain storm. We were tracking a bull when thunder ominously began crashing around us. You know what that means: lightning. Within minutes bolts of lightning were blazing to the ground around us. We were at the top of the mountain. It was the perfect place for a lightning rod and unfortunately we were it.
Was that lightning? You hold the tripod. No, you hold it.
My camera partner decided to heed advice he learned as a child. Instead of hiding in the timber to wait out the storm, he remembered the old saying of always go to the open and get away from trees. I didn’t question him as he huddled in the bare, rock-strewn avalanche chute, but I quickly did the math. There were hundreds of thousands of trees around to attract the voltage of a lightning strike. The odds of one of them being the tree I was huddled under was slim to none.
On the other hand, he was sitting in the open and in addition to lightning crackling around him, hail was beginning to drop from the sky and driven by gusty winds. After taking a beating for a few minutes, he decided to forget about the sage advice he had learned as a child and met me in the woods.
It was the best decision he could have made. He was safe from the lightning and from the hail. A few minutes later we quit the hunt as the hail turned to snow making our descent from the 11,500-foot peak questionable at best.
How did we do last week? Stay tuned.
Mark Kayser
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