A Bolt from the Blue Read online

  Erica and Clint, both from Idaho, first met each other at Idaho State University. Clint was studying accounting, finance, and computer information systems, and Erica was in the nursing program. In keeping with their mutual love of the outdoors, they went snowboarding on their first date. They didn’t mess around with their courtship—they were engaged after three months, married after eight, long before finishing college.

  Clint took additional college courses in accounting, graduating officially in 2002, by which time he and Erica had had two children. Adison was born in the summer of 1999, and Daxton came along almost exactly two years later. Clint described his life with Erica as “the American dream”—two kids, a house, a great job. In only their mid-20s, they seemed to have already achieved so many of their goals, yet they continued to have, as Clint says, “big plans.”

  Clint’s somewhat reticent personality was more than balanced out by Erica’s gracious charm. When the family moved to a new neighborhood, Erica was the one taking cookies around to meet the neighbors rather than waiting for them to welcome her to the street. In five years of marriage, the couple never had one fight, never were frustrated with each other, never even raised their voices with each other, a dynamic that Clint readily attributes to Erica’s kindhearted, selfless nature. Although Clint himself was easygoing, he realized that Erica was responsible for fostering the exceptional harmony in their relationship.

  At age 25, in addition to her family and nursing classes at Idaho State, Erica’s focus was on charitable work, donating her time to people in need. Clint would mock-complain about this aspect of her character to friends—“Well, Erica brought some homeless people home again, gave them food, gave them my clothes”—when it was obvious how much he admired her for it.

  Sitting on the top of the pitch, squeezed close against his wife, Clint contemplated the lakes and canyons below, a brilliant expanse of scenery encompassing a panorama of majestic mountains sweeping down to the Wyoming plains. The Montana countryside and the geysers of Yellowstone sprawled out to the north; to the west, the Snake River wound throughout both the deserts and the fertile pasturelands of Idaho.

  Despite the wind rushing around them, Clint and Erica existed only in a private cocoon of silence and stillness. The cold and the exhaustion of the day fell away. Lost in the rawness of their seclusion, Erica’s face revealed only an absolute and unqualified connection to the jubilation Clint was feeling.

  “It was worth it,” she said. The view was worth the climb.

  Even though they were heading down without reaching the top of the mountain, those minutes alone together, the two of them inexorably linked, granted them a more profound joy than merely touching the summit ever could have. Some of the last words out of Clint’s mouth to his wife before lightning struck were how surreal, how dreamlike, the whole adventure seemed, how beautiful it was to share the experience with her.

  Erica leaned into Clint’s shoulder as she expressed how much it meant to her that they were there together . . . and then the moment was over.

  In unison, Clint and Erica transferred their attention and their eyes down to Rod, climbing on a belay line below them, about halfway up the pitch. Erica shifted her weight ever so slightly away from her husband, thighs still touching but her upper body leaning back a bit, freeing the rope up to give Clint space to focus on Rod.

  When Erica had nestled in next to Clint, she had not unroped or clipped into the anchor. Clint had to take Erica’s rope out of the Black Diamond–ATC belay device, then put the device on the rope below her knot so he could belay the rope leading to Rod.

  This procedure would take Erica and Rod off belay for the time it took Clint to relock the carabiner back into his harness. If he had had more time, Clint would have done things differently, but it was just going to take a second. A quick unclip and reclip, the matter of a blink of an eye. He yelled down to Rod, asking him if he had a good hold. All three of them were tied to one rope, and for a second, the belay device was not going to be holding the rope anymore.

  In the instant Clint unhooked the equipment, Rod was still connected to the rope but completely detached from the belay device. If, for instance, lightning were to have struck in the split-second before Clint was able to reclip, ripping Rod off the mountain, there would have been no device to stop the rope from running out its full length. Best case, without a belay, Rod would have fallen until his rope played out, in fast motion, and came tight against Erica, hurtling him 200 feet down the mountain until he was jerked to a stop on the end of the rope. He almost certainly would have suffered fatal injuries when he hit the ledge at the bottom of Friction Pitch. In addition, since Erica wasn’t anchored, she would have been yanked off the ledge as well, and fallen half the length of the rope. The rope would have then spun out until it came tight against Clint, pulling him off the mountain and stranding him, suspended in air, near the top of the rope.

  More likely, however, the anchor would have failed from the violence of the weight of all three people straining against it so abruptly, and everyone would have plunged to their deaths.

  Clint reclipped the belay device. He heard the metallic scrape it made as it clicked into place securely. The next sound he heard was the reverberation of his own screams.

  As Clint began to come to, the sensation was not at all like waking up from sleep. He was alone in the dark, not knowing where he was and not understanding why he didn’t know. His eyes were closed at first, then, when they did open, utterly unfocused. He could not grasp onto an idea of where he could be or what he was doing.

  Clint finally caught a glimpse of the valley and realized that he had been climbing. The next thought he had was What is that piercing noise, and where is it coming from? He slowly began to realize that it was him shrieking as loudly as he could. He had no idea why he was screaming. He did not know that he had just been struck by a bolt of lightning. He hadn’t yet felt the pain, at least not consciously. He hadn’t had the time or the capacity to understand anything about Erica. In any event, he yelled until his breath ran out.

  Only then did Clint look down at his left side, and Erica was sprawled against him, leaning on him, and she was not moving, and she was not breathing. The events, the timing, began to blur for Clint at that point. Erica remained on the rope connected to Rod, with her rope in his belay device. She was pressed up against Clint’s body, and they were tied together with ropes and harnesses, and she lay limp next to him, and on him, and he couldn’t move.

  He held his wife in his one good arm, his right arm, the only arm he could feel, and shook her. He still could not comprehend what was going on with her.

  Smoke filled the air, and the acrid smell of burned hair and scorched flesh was all around him.

  And then he was screaming again, his throat aching, screaming in confusion about what had happened to Erica, what had happened to him. He had no feeling in his lower body, both of his legs were completely numb, he couldn’t move his left arm. His left thigh, where it had been touching Erica’s right leg, was torn up, and his foot was badly burned.

  He screamed Erica’s name, he screamed at her to wake up, he screamed for Rod, he screamed for help.

  Clint couldn’t see or, more accurately, couldn’t accept the physical injuries to Erica. Without processing the actual condition of her body, however, he realized within a matter of seconds, long before he had stopped shouting for help, that she was gone. He could tell that there was no responsiveness, no spirit, no life. This wasn’t Erica anymore. He knew with certainty, as he phrased it later, that Erica was simply done.

  All of a sudden, Rob appeared from the other side of a granite outcropping. From his perspective, Erica initially looked unharmed, leaning up against Clint. Clint was still howling, ungodly sounds coming out of his mouth. Then Rob saw Erica up close, and everything started to unravel.

  Unlike her husband, Rob had no illusions about the way Erica looked. Her eyes bulged out of her head, her lips were black. The right side of her face
was badly scorched. Her wind-breaker and green zip-off pants were shredded and melted. Her clothes were blown outward, as if her skin had exploded. Where the rips were, revealing her legs and her stomach, it was as if a force had burst from the inside out.

  Rob slid in next to Erica, and Clint released his hold on her. She fell motionless across Rob’s lap. Rob checked for a pulse and found none, then he unclasped Erica’s shiny black helmet. Her hair was matted with blood, and fluid leaked from her ears.

  As Rob began to perform CPR on Erica, it became evident that the lightning had sucked the moisture out of her body. Her throat was dry and blackened, and it felt as if there was a rock in her chest. Rob actually rolled her over to see if there was a stone underneath her back before recognizing that she had experienced massive internal injuries. At first, the skin on the right side of Erica’s body was burned bright pink and red, but as Rob worked over her, it soon turned black and blue. Her body quickly began to swell and puff up, making her appear as if she had been beaten.

  Rob had a difficult angle to give Erica CPR, as Clint was twisted in his harness and crowding the space. Clint’s fingers were not working well, and he couldn’t stand on his legs, so Rob helped Clint out of his harness and moved him away from the edge of Friction Pitch, away from Erica.

  Not wanting to move the gear, they left Clint’s harness where it was. Clint’s anchor had sustained the weight of Rod’s fall off the mountain. Rob could see where Rod had fallen, precariously belly-up below, and he yelled down that he would get help to him. From the top of the pitch, Rob was able to hear him moaning, but he wasn’t sure whether Rod was actually responding to his voice. In triaging the situation, he focused on trying to revive Erica.

  The two men continued CPR together, Clint forcing air into Erica’s mouth, Rob compressing her chest. At some point, sitting next to each other on the ledge, the friends admitted the truth to each other. They held Erica’s lifeless form and closed their eyes and shared a moment of reflection.

  Even though Clint and Rob already knew that Erica was dead, they traded off giving her mouth-to-mouth for approximately 45 more minutes, trying somehow to save her, to bring her back. Long after the climbers had contacted the rangers on the phone for help and the rangers advised them to check her vitals again and then be done, stop CPR, they continued to labor over Erica’s body.

  After first gently pushing her eyes back into their sockets, Rob’s father, Bob, began a second series of attempts to resuscitate her, followed by Sherika, who took a turn for almost 20 minutes. In the aftermath, it became clear that Erica had been hit by a direct bolt of lightning that entered the top of her head and stopped her heart instantly. She never took another breath. The lightning had then jumped into Clint, snapping his leg, and wound down the rope to blast Rod into his inverted position.

  As evidence of the level of shock the climbers were experiencing in their fight to save Erica, they had given barely a thought to Rod and the three climbers lost below them. When Rob’s dad took over mouth-to-mouth on Erica, Rob walked away and took a minute to himself.

  Before the lightning had struck, just before Rob was knocked unconscious, he had a sensation of being crushed, of every single muscle in his body contracting at once. He had been climbing roughly 15 feet up a face, with Sherika scrambling up below him, when he heard a vibrating hum. He couldn’t determine the source of the sound, but at high altitude, climbers sometimes hear a ringing in their ears, so Rob yelled down to Sherika, asking her if she had heard anything. She couldn’t catch what he had said and asked him to repeat it, but before he could answer, the ground-current charge slammed him, convulsing his body, and he was falling, he thought feet-first, sliding down. In reality, he was plummeting face-first, the weight and momentum of his backpack spinning him off the mountain.

  It wasn’t until months later, when Sherika heard Rob describing the accident, that she told him about the actual details of his fall. Sherika, climbing below Rob, had seen him falling and slammed her hands into his chest. She shoved back on him, forcing him onto the ridge, throwing him down onto the three-foot ledge. She had been shocked by the dissipating current herself but was aware enough of what was going on to yell, “Rob, don’t you dare fall!”

  Long after the tragedy, Rob teased Sherika that she must have some sort of superpower, because when she had felt the voltage coming up to her hips, shocking her like an electrified fence, she shouted “No!” at it, and it stopped. While the section of rock where Rob had been climbing at the time of the strike wasn’t completely vertical, the slope was greater than 45 degrees, not a place to meander. He might have landed on the ledge on his own, but more likely, his wife broke what would have been a deadly descent off the face of the mountain.

  When Rob roused himself after the strike, he was lying on his back with Sherika standing over him, a horrified expression on her face. As he stared back at her, it only took him an instant to figure out what had happened. He couldn’t move his left arm at all. The trekking poles tied on his back had burn holes at the top, and some of his cams had melted and welded together. Fearing another strike, he immediately tore off his gear and his harness so he wouldn’t have any metal on him. Within a few seconds, he heard Clint’s wails and went to find him.

  With Rob having been higher than Erica on the mountain, he was theoretically the more likely candidate for a direct lightning strike. In addition, as Erica sat on the edge of the ledge, there was an outcropping of rock above her that the lightning missed entirely. It seemed almost as if lightning didn’t play its role correctly in the scenario. It should have hit Rob; it should have aimed for the other parties of climbers nearer to the summit; it should have collided with the mountain itself. According to the science of the phenomenon, as opposed to the mysticism, lightning should not have struck where, or who, it did.

  As Rob paced the edge of the pitch, his dad still performing mouth-to-mouth on Erica, he didn’t even try to make sense of the situation. He did, however, try to take stock of it: one friend dead, another one dead or dying, three missing.

  Sherika had placed the initial 911 call for help, using Bob’s cell phone. When the rangers began asking a bunch of questions that she felt she couldn’t or didn’t want to answer, she passed the phone off to Bob to continue talking to them. Bob had left his phone on during the day, so his batteries only held out for the initial call. After that, Bob switched to Clint’s cell phone and used that to communicate with the ranger station. The climbers understood that their rescue was under way.

  Until this point, Rod and the other members of his group on the top of the pitch had been focused on Erica to the exclusion of helping anyone else. While they felt helpless to do anything for Rod until help arrived, it was beginning to sink in with Rob that they hadn’t yet located the three climbers on the fourth rope team who had disappeared from the base of Friction Pitch, one of whom was his brother, Justin.

  “Hey, Just!” he yelled over the side of the mountain, first tentatively, then again and again, gaining in volume each time. There was no response. He tried to raise Justin on the radio but did not receive an answer.

  He began frantically shouting “Can you hear me?” out over the mountain, his words adrift on the wind. When his brother’s voice failed to come back to him from below, Rob hesitated in the unknown. Minutes before, they had all been heading off the mountain to safety, and now his brother was lost out in the ether, somewhere Rob couldn’t see him or hear him. Uncertainty loosened its grip on Rob’s psyche, and fear laced with panic slithered in to take its place.

  Clint, who had dragged himself over to another crag of rock, felt that he needed to make a decision as a spouse. He was the one who made the call to stop CPR, acknowledging out loud that Erica was gone. With his injuries, he had limited resources to help physically, but he knew that there were other people in danger and that they needed to focus on saving the people who potentially still could be saved.

  Clint’s feelings were mixed at that point; he was strangely
calm, clearly in shock. He was not out of his mind, not hysterical. The idea of concentrating on helping someone other than Erica seemed to channel his energy. Despite having just lost his wife, Clint did what he could for the group by acting as the positive element. He flashed determined and optimistic spirits, telling Rob that they had Web sites to build and they were going to get off the mountain.

  Clint’s left leg and foot, as well as his backside, were badly burned. There was an entry wound in his thigh where lightning had passed from Erica to him. His shorts were in tatters. Rob was worried that Clint was becoming hypothermic. Clouds had moved in to shroud the entire ledge, the wind had swelled sharply, and the temperature was dropping rapidly. Rob retrieved his extra clothes from his backpack and helped Clint pull on long underwear and a windbreaker.

  Rob was still having trouble maneuvering his left arm, so Sherika took his climbing shoes off for him and put his boots on for him and tied them. The rangers had communicated to the group that because of the weather and the time of day, they should be prepared to spend the night on the mountain. Rob knew that the temperature on the top of the mountain would soon dip into freezing territory. He was certain that if they had to stay there all night, several more of them were not going to get off the mountain alive. As Rob snuggled with Clint to keep him warm, he thought it was likely that Clint would die before morning.

  Clint tried to persuade his friend to climb down to check on Rod, but Rob believed that there was no way to do it safely. In addition, the rangers on the phone had made it clear that people who had been hit by lightning should not be moving around.

  In an attempt to shield them from the wind, Sherika’s dad, Steve, began piling up rocks to build a low wall. Steve did his best to keep everyone occupied so that they could only dwell on the discrete tasks in front of them. Bob kept himself busy yelling a steady stream of support and encouragement down to Rod.