Here in the Great Land of Alaska, we don't see too many thunderstorms. Oh, there are usually a few rumblings in June and July, with the odd lightning strike, but we don't often get the big earth-shakers I experienced as a kid in Iowa. But back in the day, I had a few too-close experiences with weather, and in particular, lightning.

One such came not long after I relocated to Colorado. At high altitudes, the weather can move in quickly, and the rumbles of thunder are somewhat different in the thin alpine air of the high country. An interesting feature in Colorado is the highest paved highway in the world, the Mount Evans Scenic Highway, which tops out on the 14,130-foot summit of that peak, where there is a small, domed observatory. One day, when my oldest daughter was about eight, I decided to take her up that highway to admire the incredible views from the summit. 

When we got to the top of the road, though, gray clouds were hovering overhead, seemingly within touching distance. They were grumbling with that weird, tinny sound that high-altitude lightning has. The kid was excited, though, and the views were still there, so we got out of my pickup and started having a look around. There were several other groups already present, so I figured things would be OK.

As we admired the views, though, an odd buzzing sound kept intruding. I couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t a sound an insect would make, and flying insects were not present on that bare, windswept peak in any case. I looked around for the source of the noise as the clouds muttered overhead.

Finally, I homed in on the source. The steel doors of the observatory dome opened and closed on a hinge supported by a steel armature that arced up over the top of the dome. And, as I watched, static electricity was arcing across the gap between dome and armature.

The clouds’ muttering got louder.

I called my daughter, who came running to my side. “We need to go,” I told her. She protested but not too much, as she was an unusually well-behaved child. As I took her hand, I heard a sharp pop. About six feet away stood a college-age kid wearing one of those knit jester’s caps with a half-dozen tassels. The pop had been the sound of the cap levitating off his head, accompanied by his hair suddenly standing on end. “Whoa, dude,” he said to his friend, “did you see that?”

“Get down!” I shouted at him. I grabbed my kid, pushed her down to the rocky ground, and, having no desire to have her see this guy incinerated in front of her young eyes, covered her face with my hands. We waited for a few moments for the inevitable strike, which turned out to be evitable after all. Nothing happened. The college kid, in his ignorance, continued to stand as he and his buddy made a fairly good “Beavis and Butthead laughing” impression. I got my daughter into the truck and got the heck out of there.

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But my own closest call came much earlier.

One late June afternoon during my thirteenth summer, my old buddy Jon and I bicycled over to the junction of North Bear and South Bear creeks, where the two smaller streams joined forces to form plain old Bear Creek, the same stream that ran through my parents' property. Right after the tributaries combined were several good-sized pools, which usually held good populations of hungry trout in the cold, spring-fed water.

We fished throughout the afternoon, somehow not managing to limit out. As evening came on the sky grew dark, a cool wind freshened, and raindrops began to dapple the creek. As warm as the day had been, the clouds looked heavy, and we could hear thunder in the near distance.

“Gonna be a drencher,” Jon opined with all the wisdom his fourteen-year-old self could muster. “Won’t make it back to your house in time.”

“Guess we’d better find a place near here to wait it out. Think we could make the old trapper’s cabin up top?” I pointed to the hillside looming over us to the south.

Jon looked up the hill at the steep slope covered with raspberry thickets. “Don’t think so,” he said. “Better find something closer.”

So, we decided to take shelter under the old iron bridge spanning Bear Creek near the old county campsite.

That’s right. A bridge. An iron bridge. In case you slept through your elementary school science classes, iron conducts electricity. The amount of iron you find in an old iron bridge, even a modest one like the old one spanning Bear Creek just upstream from Quandahl, can conduct a lot of electricity.

For about thirty minutes, we were well satisfied with our choice. We were still able to fish from the bank under the north end of the iron bridge, and the tightly fitted heavy oak planking of the bridge made a better-than-fair roof. But the rain grew heavier, the wind picked up, and the thunder slowly rolled in closer.

BOOM! A bolt touched down on the hilltop above us. Another struck a large cottonwood just a way upstream.

“Say,” I said, “you don’t think…”

“What?”

“I mean, this bridge is iron. And there’s a lot of lightning coming in.”

“Don’t worry,” Jon said. His voice was filled with confidence. “We’re just fine. There are trees around taller than the bridge, nothing’s gonna hit…”

His voice was cut off by a sudden, blinding flash of light.

Near as we could figure out later, a bolt of lightning struck the top of the bridge, split up and ran down both sides of the iron framework, and jumped from there to the creek bank and the water. But what it looked like to us was this:

The initial blinding flash gave way to curtains of sparks and arcs of electricity hitting the ground from either side of the bridge. At the same moment, the very ground beneath our feet shook from the impossible, roaring CRACK of the super-heated bolt hitting the bridge. We both clapped our hands over our ears in agony.

Above our heads, the bridge frame rang like a bell. The air sizzled; the ground crackled. Runners and rivulets of white-hot electricity scampered around the creek bank, hitting the water and hissing, hitting the mud bank and sparkling, hitting our feet and making us dance like two demented jackrabbits suffering from a terminal case of St. Vitus’s Dance.

I made for the creek water, hoping to dunk my sparking, smoking shoes, but the water was alive, crackling with energy. Jon leaped and instinctively grabbed a piece of the iron bridge frame and hung there, yelping; the iron frame was alive with electricity that ran through him and arced from his sneakers to the ground, but the current locked his muscles and wouldn’t let him let go.

Then, as suddenly as it came on, it was over. The rain began to come down, turning the creek water white. A heavy, drenching rain like that would quickly make the creek rise; it was time to go.

I looked at Jon. Finally able to control his hands, he dropped to the mud of the creek bank. Streaks of soot discolored his face. His shoes, jeans, and t-shirt smoldered. His smoking hair stood out at 90-degree angles from his scalp. Somehow, I knew I looked just the same.

“Let’s go,” Jon gasped. We ran for where our bikes were parked up on the approach to the bridge, climbed aboard, and pedaled for home. When I stumbled in the front door, the Old Man looked up from his book and cast his optics over my scorched countenance.

“Got caught in the storm?” he said, his taciturn nature as always in evidence. I nodded and headed off to dry off and change.

Weather can be fun to watch. I still enjoy, from a safe place, a good summer thunderstorm. But tornados and lightning, that's a different story. One close call with lightning was more than enough for me - as was my one close call with a tornado. But that's a story for another time.