Last Sunday (May 10), climbing from the Red Caves to Dolgorukovskaya Yayla, our group got caught in the rain. There had already been a lot of rain this May, so no one was particularly surprised or scared. We stopped, put on our raincoats and moved on. But the cloud turned out to be a surprise and soon we heard thunder.
The situation, in principle, is normal - a thunderstorm, an open slope, followed by an even more open plateau. Everything is clear, we must hide. However, even in such an obvious situation, even for such a cautious person as me, the decision to stop “passed” with a creak. After all, walking in the rain is much warmer than standing.
And yet, after a second of hesitation, the decision was made to hide. We went down into the hollow, huddled among the low apple trees and bushes and covered ourselves with an awning. A couple of minutes later, a group of speleologists who had appeared from nowhere “rolled” into the same hollow. So we stood for about 20 minutes, waited until the thunderstorm carried it a couple of kilometers and moved on. On the way, we found a small wet bunny who sat motionless among the flowers and did not move even when we began to take close-up photographs of him.
That's the whole story. Nothing interesting. But I couldn’t help but think that everything was not so simple. Too thin a line separates this calm narrative from another, potentially tragic story. Would everything have been just as good if I hadn’t gotten scared and stopped the group? Would another instructor do the same? Or maybe you should have stopped even earlier? Was it possible to hide all together, or should we disperse? (Again, theory is one thing, and quite another to order wet, freezing people to disperse along the slope and squat while awaiting new instructions).
These thoughts prompted me to study the issue more deeply, which resulted in the writing of another article about safety while hiking: Protection against lightning in the mountains
P.S. According to the press service of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, on May 10 at about 16:00 two Crimeans died from a lightning strike. This happened with an interval of 15 minutes in different parts of the Dzhankoy region of Crimea.