Welcome back. This is The Sharp End, a podcast from Accident to North American Climbing.

I'm Ashley Soppy, your host for the show.

Here's a story on lightning. I've got a gentleman here named Nick who had quite the experience.

Welcome to the show, Nick.. Hi Ashley how are you? Yeah I'm good

thanks for asking. So you had an experience with a pretty close encounter with lightning

I want you to go and tell us about it.

So this happened back in August in,

I guess this was about two years ago, or maybe a year and a half ago now and me and my kind of most regular climbing partner

Guy named Matt we we had gotten our eyes fixed on this objective in the high Sierra. We sort of started climbing mostly to kind of be able to play around in our backyard up there and to be able to access a lot of these kind of iconic peaks in the high Sierra.

And so we kind of set our eyes on something called Bear Creek Spire out there which

maybe some of your listeners will know of it's sort of this really classic

beautiful striking peak up up in the Sierra's got some some really classic

ridge line routes that go up to it and the one that we were looking at was called

the North Aret and it goes at about five

eight it's about six pitches kind of your classic high-seera alpine style climbing

and we just thought it was really beautiful it was like kind of right in the

wheelhouse of our kind of difficulty level and you know we were we were really

looking forward to getting up there.

So we had gotten a forecast of, you know, kind of like a really typical high Sierra's lightning forecast which is

thunderstorms starting off in the afternoon usually like right about 11 o'clock

is when they say there might or might not be some scattered thunderstorms and you know that's a pretty

typical forecast and you know I guess at this point after everything happened I'm a little

...