“If you see the flash, then you haven’t been struck.”

I kept repeating this fact to myself in my head as my dog, Dozer, and I were crouched under a cluster of trees, trying to wait out the storm. We were enveloped by an intense electrical storm and I had already removed my metal watch so as to avoid being seriously burned should I be struck.

I had been in the middle of electrical storms before. But, this one was on a different level. The extreme intensity of the storm was one part of it. But, I was also backpacking solo (only with my dog), at 11,000 feet in elevation.

I knew we were in for some bad weather that day when I crawled out of my tent early in the morning. The sun was out, but the “fish-scale” clouds were out, too, just to the west. This cloud formation looks peaceful, like a giant sheet of connected little cotton balls. But, it indicates the leading edge of a cold front. In the Colorado San Juans in July, that meant stormy weather and cooler temperatures were on the way. That much, I had correct. What I miscalculated was the swiftness with which the bad weather would move in.

Anyone who has spent any time in the Colorado high country in the summer knows of the threat of daily afternoon thunderstorms. A day in the mountains in July or August without some rain and some accompanying lighting and thunder nearby is unusual. It is a near daily occurrence as the heat of the day mixes with moisture that drifts up through the southwest from the Gulf of California. This is the same weather phenomenon, the summer monsoon, that causes extraordinarily severe storms in the desert of Arizona. When that moisture hits the high mountains of southern Colorado, the storms, while they may not be as massive, are much more numerous and consistent. And, at 11,000 feet, at the head of a canyon, they can be, locally, every bit as intense as any storm in Arizona or the Midwest.

But, this was no normal afternoon monsoon season storm. A front was coming through, and while I knew we were in for some stormy weather later that day, I figured we had several hours to go before it hit. I was wrong. We began our third day of hiking at about 8:00 that morning from our camp at about 10,700 feet along the rugged headwaters of the South Fork of the Conejos River. By 8:30, I heard the sound of distant thunder over the south ridge of the canyon, an exceptionally early time of day for that. I kept hiking, hoping that the front was weak, and it would pass with little more than a few minor showers and some distant thunder before becoming sunny again for the remainder of the day. It was wishful thinking. By 9:00 the first few drops of rain began to fall and the thunder was getting a little louder. Over the southern ridge, the opposite side of the canyon from where we were, I observed two storm heads building and merging. A patch of blue sky to the west was getting smaller, crowded out by the two merging storms to the south and southwest and a third one to the northwest. I realized then that we may be right under the center point of what would become one big, bad, slow-moving morning Rocky Mountain storm.