A bolt out of the blue

Lightning strikes ahead of the storm at Vedauwoo

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When she made the choice to call climbing to an end that day at Vedauwoo, a rock climbing area in southern Wyoming, Emily Isaacs was making what she saw as a conservative call on safety. Most of the 12- to 13-year-old girls on The Women’s Wilderness Institute trip she was working as a rock tech for had climbed by lunch, and while they were eating, Isaacs, a wilderness therapist and professional rock climbing guide, started to see the traces of a storm on the horizon.

“I said, ‘I do not want to get stuck taking down anchors during a thunderstorm’ and verbalized that, which was like, duh, of course I don’t,” she says. It was also weirdly prescient.

There was no rain, and she had not seen lightning or heard thunder, but decided it was time to wrap up their excursion climbing on the Nautilus on the first day of their trip.

“I actually felt like kind of a party pooper when I said I’m gonna call it,” Isaacs says. “I was like, this is still really in the margin of safety, I’m being really conservative.”

Vedauwoo’s mounds of Sherman granite, a con glomerate that can shred through skin like so much cheese on a grater, are visible loping their way along the prairie from Interstate 80, particularly the signature Nautilus, a 200-foot-high formation shaped like a cruise ship near the edge of the area, which is as popular among local gun enthusiasts as it is among masochistic climbers.

But Isaacs and her group of girls were in an area they refer to as the “Wishbone,” in the body of the Nautilus feature and accessed by scrambling up a short boulderfield to a ledge. She’d set ropes up on a trio of moderate routes — grades 5.8 and lower. Easy enough that when she decided to take the anchors down, she didn’t even take off her approach shoes to climb up to clear the anchors.

One last girl was allowed to climb while Isaacs quickly ascended the 40 or 50 feet, and began to clear the climbing anchors. She wasn’t incredibly exposed — not even at the top of the rock, but Vedauwoo is already at 8,000 feet in elevation and its rocks are the tallest thing around.

She’d taken down the first route, clipping the metal anchors onto the right side of her harness.

That’s just about the last thing she remembers, she says, before there was a huge boom. What followed next came in strobe-like flashes. Her arm moving away from her body without her moving it. Falling away from the anchor and onto the ledge above the routes. The girls below her screaming.

“I’m pretty sure I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is it,’ and kind of a sense of, this is not how I expected things to end. This is not what I expected at all,” Isaacs says. “I’m pretty protective of myself and I make fairly conservative calls outside and I’m a pretty experienced wilderness professional, and still, I sort of think I’m immortal, the way we think of young men thinking they’re immortal. Even though I get pretty scared, I don’t want to fall, there’s still this sense, well, I’m never gonna die, and I think in that moment there was this sense of, ‘Oh gosh, it could happen this easy,’ and that was really powerful and I don’t want that to go away. I want to hold on to that because it was a pretty intense moment.”

She came to and saw her shoe blown off her right foot and her jeans shredded as though she’d been attacked by a lion. There was a hole in her sock on the side of her foot and through it she could see a foot she describes looking “toasted” at the moment. A hole was melted in her fleece sweatshirt near her elbow where her arm had been touching the metal anchors, and in a strip down her forearm. Her legs and feet tingled. The air had an ozone-like char smell, she says, that still lingers on her burned sock.

It took her a moment to process that she’d been struck by lightning.

Below her, the other trip leaders from TWWI offered to come up and get her, but in a matter of minutes, she assessed herself for a spinal injury, decided that it was the side of her body and not her spine that hurt and that it would be faster to lower herself. She tossed her shoe to the ledge below, calling “Rock!” as she threw it, shouted to one of the trip’s co-leaders how to provide a backup belay by holding the ropes at the base of the climb, clipped herself into a rappel device as she had a thousand times before and lowered herself to the base of the climb.

“It was just amazingly powerful what we can do with adrenalin,” she says. “To jump on the personal train, climbing is a deeply personal path for me as well as a physical sport. It is a really deep path of mind, body, soul, heart, everything. And so for me to have that moment of like, this is a crisis, this is an emergency and I’m performing, was huge … Just to feel like my competency came out was just unusually powerful and is really why I teach climbing to women, it really is because of that.”

Once she had finished her rappel, she paused for a moment at the base of the cliff just to look eye to eye with the trip co-leader to reaffirm that she was, in fact, there. She then grabbed her car keys and rain coat and headed for her car in the parking lot just a few minutes’ hike away.

“It’s amazing in those moments how a thousand dollars of gear just does not mean anything,” she says. “All my gear I’ve collected for 10 years, it was like, this does not matter. I just want to get to my car.”

The other team leader had already begun a lightning drill with the girls — having them curl into a squat on top of their backpacks — and was assessing them for injuries and calming them down from the scare. She’d already called 911. Even as the ambulance arrived and loaded Isaacs up, there was just a little rain. They saw a few lightning strikes on the horizon.

“I will emphasize that this did seem like quite a freak incident,” says Isaacs, who’s kept her certification in wilderness medicine for the roughly 10 years she’s worked in the field. “I’ve been in some pretty sticky, intense alpine lightning scenarios, and also high plateau Utah lightning scenarios. So I’m very concerned with lightning and carefully assessing it and this was definitely a situation of a bolt way ahead of the storm, which we’re taught about, but it is an anomaly.”

Isaacs was taken first to the Laramie, Wyo., medical center, and quickly transferred to the burn unit at a hospital in Greeley, where she would stay for three days while medical staff monitored her heart and her burns, waiting for signs that the lightning strike had damaged internal tissue and watched to see if the burns on her foot would require a skin graft.

“Having gone to Naropa for the past three years, it was like, mindfulness: on board,” she says and laughs. Throughout her experience, Isaacs says the people who surrounded her created a halo of safety and comfort, like the firefighter who rode with her in the ambulance from Laramie to Greeley and talked with her the whole time.

“Having people willing to engage with me like that, that was really big, just recognizing, stay with this, and not going to some imaginary place where my leg gets amputated, just staying with what’s happening right now,” she says.

She called her fiancé immediately, and he was with her the first night she was in the hospital.

“That first night was the hardest. Every time I’d start to fall asleep … I’d start to feel it, revisit the day or have a weird climbing dream and that was really disturbing. It was just too much,” she says. “That first 24 hours, it was the most potent, sort of battling self doubt — did I do something wrong?” 

She woke her fiancé at 3 a.m. 

“He held my hand in the middle of the night and talked to me about having lightning as my totem, and then I could hear thunder in the distance and I’d know that that power was inside of me,” she says.

In the first few weeks after she was able to come home, she says, she heard a lot of thunder, and thought about it as “powerful medicine.”

Her burns covered 8 percent of her body, all of them partial thickness (as opposed to full thickness, in which the skin is destroyed and excision or grafts are required). Seventeen days after the Aug. 5 incident, the bandages remaining around her leg — gauze wrapped from high on her thigh to around her foot — are largely to keep the skin clean. Her injuries have been reduced to pale pink webs and nebulas of new skin, and she’s smiling and optimistic, laughing about how yes, she has lots of photos. She and her fiancé photographed her injuries every day to track her recovery — they met on an Outward Bound program, are both climbers and both trained in first aid, and it’s been fascinating to watch her body heal.

“It doesn’t feel like an accident, it feels like a huge opportunity, and I’ve been really lucky. I don’t think there’s going to be any long-term issues. Right now, I’m just wearing this dressing to protect the skin. It’s all closed,” she says. “It’s been an opportunity to just look around and see how fortunate I am and yeah, I’ve been really taken care of and I’ve also had the ability to take care of myself, both those things have been really powerful.”

A couple of things became clear to Isaacs. The work she loves is her private therapy practice, where she often blends in wilderness therapy components.

“And I know, like in my bones, that I want to marry my fiancé,” she says. She’d walked off from her gear at the bottom of the crag (it did eventually get carried back to her, and someone climbed up and cleared the ropes from the routes, too). One of her fiancé’s first questions was, would she ever want to climb again.

“Of course, this is part of my profession,” she says. “I do therapy in the office but I also have the possibility of taking people outside and especially empowering women and girls through climbing, so that is just not something that’s going to go away.” 

She first started climbing at the age of 17, and it’s been a driving force for her since after college, when she started climbing with women’s groups and in National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) programs in the San Francisco area and even at the Cragmont Climbing Club, where many of the early Yosemite climbers went to train. That grew to a month-long trip to the famed Valley with a friend, the two of them climbing everything under 5.8 they could find, until they were ready to lead 5.9s — celebrating their own triumphs fully.

“In Boulder in particular, there are some people doing some really big adventures here, some really amazing races, but it’s just like, this is my size epic adventure. This is my big, hairy, audacious goal, and this is the right size for me,” she says. “It’s like a little bit bigger than I can truly imagine, but I think I can do it.”

The right size epic is different for everyone — think rope-snags on 5.6 routes and descending Half Dome in the dark after a victorious round on Snake Dike. The climbing path led her to wilderness therapy in Utah, where for eight days she was on, working with teenagers in the wilderness, and for six days she was off, climbing in Indian Creek and honing her crack technique.

Climbing has come in ebbs and flows, she says. These days, if she’s out, she’s often on favorite routes in the area. But it continues to feed a series of evolutions.

“I’m constantly breaking through these imagined ceilings, like the imagined ceiling of being 17 and thinking I’d never ever lead, or the imagined ceiling of maybe only sport because it’s less complicated-seeming or the imagined ceiling of, I’d never lead 5.10, I’m not that athletic,” she says. She’s gone on to do all of those things, and more — be the NOLS instructor she never thought possible, lead in Indian Creek.

Now, it’s teaching others to tap into  that emotional ladder-work that climbing can be that she finds fulfilling. She’s grown from learning, to trusting herself, to teaching. Particularly for women, climbing has been powerful for teaching self-trust and confident decisionmaking, an understanding of risk and a willingness to negotiate with it.

“It feels like a really good forum for all these life lessons around deep self trust,” she says. “When you’re up there at the end of the rope leading and you’re run out above your last piece and you’re making a decision, ‘Do I go on or do I place pro?’ or ‘Which way do I think the route goes,’ you’re the only one up there and you need to be able to trust yourself to make some sort of call and go with it. And maybe it’s right or wrong or who knows, but you make a call and then you adjust from there, and you make mistakes, like you get a ton of rope drag, and you learn from it, and it’s so real. So I think it’s just a really amazing forum to teach and teach people about themselves.” 

For those reasons, the parents of those nine girls were fully supportive of them staying on The Women’s Wilderness Institute trip after phone calls went home about the accident that had taken their rock tech out of the trip.

After Isaacs was in the hospital, the group of girls and their trip leaders gathered to talk about what had happened, to process and decide how to proceed. They were all asked to close their eyes, and raise hands to show whether they wanted to stay on the trip, or wanted to go home. Two of nine wanted to leave. The group discussed the options, the realities, what had happened, then had everyone close eyes again and show hands. Nothing had changed. Two girls went home, and the rest stayed.

“I think it’s really important for kids to learn that scary things happen and that doesn’t mean that we give up or that we shouldn’t go outside,” says Shari Leach, executive director of The Women’s Wilderness Institute — and that was the message she got from the parents whose daughters were on the trip. Leach was the one calling many of the families to let them know what had happened, and to expect a phone call from the hospital where their daughters were being checked out. She dialed fully expecting tears and requests for their daughters to come home.

“It absolutely amazed me, the number of them that wanted their daughters to understand that ‘Hey, that was scary, but let’s not quit,’” Leach says.

“As unpleasant and disruptive as it has to be to have a staff member injured, I have had many experiences out of doors over the years where it was scary or someone got hurt. Learning to deal with out of the ordinary experiences is really important for teenagers,” John Troeltzsch, a parent of one of the participants, wrote in an email to Leach.

“Just recognizing that there’s an element that we can prepare and hone our judgment, but there’s other pieces that we can’t control,” Isaacs says. “Stuff happens and this is a powerful reminder of that.”

Most lighting strikes occur in the rain column, according to John Gookin, National Outdoor Leadership School curriculum manager and author of the NOLS Backcountry Lightning Safety Guidelines, which say that strikes that occur out of the blue and can hit as far as 10 miles away from the cumulonimbus cloud housing the storm are “rare and unpredictable, so they shouldn’t affect our decisions.”

“They’re really random because when they happen, they happen in one place in 100 square miles instead of one place in the one square mile where the rain’s falling, so if you’re not on something that looks like Pikes Peak, you’re not at very high risk,” Gookin says.

National Weather Service’s John Jensenius agrees that a strike 20 miles ahead of the storm is “highly unusual,” adding that storms are often much closer than people think — an additional factor to consider when it comes to managing the risks of lighting.

“The afternoon is the most dangerous part,” Jensenius says. “If at all possible you should get any climbing done in the morning in the mountainous areas, and of course listen to the forecast.”

The two people killed by lightning in Rocky Mountain National Park this summer were both out at high altitude, above 10,000 feet in elevation in the afternoons.

“I think based on the people, where they were from, they probably were not completely aware of how dangerous it can be up there in the mountains in the afternoon,” Jensenius says.

Vedauwoo, Gookin notes, isn’t high altitude, but is relatively high terrain compared to the surrounding terrain.

“What you can do in a place like Vedauwoo is get off the higher ground and get to lower ground, then at least lightning is random,” Gookin says.

Plenty of myths abound when it comes to lightning — like to get rid of metal climbing gear, which he says is a relatively insignificant point and general safety should be prioritized. A group on Mt. McKinley when a storm rolled in watched other people throw away their ice axes — a poor choice, he says, because an ice ax can help with a faster descent, and that’s much more important.

“Our judgment isn’t perfect, it never is. We can hone it and learn from our mistakes,” she says, “But it’s never going to be perfect. … We can’t be risk-free. Even by avoiding risk, then we run the risk of having a boring life.”

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