Hiker tells harrowing tale of lightning strike
There was no rain, no rumbling, no sign of danger before the blinding flash and deafening bang of a lightning bolt threw Mathias Steinhuber to the ground, tore off his clothes and burned a gaping hole in his shoe.
The 31-year-old Austrian teacher, an avid hiker, had just reached the 9,000-foot summit of a Northern California mountain range ahead of his companions when he raised his arms for a picture and was struck in the back of the head. The electricity shot through his body and exited through his foot, and he was too stunned to know what had happened.
“It was like in a dream,” Steinhuber told The Associated Press Thursday. “I woke up. I had blood everywhere. My clothes were ripped apart. At some distance I heard my girlfriend scream my name. My first conclusion was that I probably fell down the mountain.”
He crawled to a ledge and saw his girlfriend and their friend below and wondered, if he’d fallen off a cliff, why was he still above them? That’s when he heard the girlfriend, Kathrin Klausner, scream that he was struck by lightning.
Steinhuber had cuts and bruises from his fall and a number of burns he described as mostly superficial. The hair on one of his arms was singed when he spoke to the AP at UC Davis Hospital Burn Center in Sacramento. He’s struggling to hear through his left ear.
The trio was hiking from Donner Summit to Squaw Valley, a short section of the rugged, 2,650mile (4,264-kilometer) Pacific Crest Trail that runs from Mexico to Canada and challenges experienced hikers from all over the world.
Steinhuber doesn’t remember being struck, only the aftermath, and drifting in and out of consciousness until help arrived.
“He was taking a picture and the next thing I know, I see this white flash, like an explosion,” the couple’s friend, Cara Elvidge, said from Fairfield.