Well, keeping in line with story telling, I'll tell the story of geting struck by lightning at the Grand Canyon.

For those of you who may not know, I took a couple weeks at the end of August to visit some of the west's beautiful natural monuments. I hitchhiked down to Santa Fe from Denver, where I met up with some Australian friends that I met while bartending there a couple years ago. From there we departed for Utah, Arizona, and Colorado.

Anyways, when we got to the Grand Canyon it was getting to be evening. I ran ahead of everyone because I wanted to catch some views while there was still a bit of light. It was a bit stormy, but not raining at all. The path I was following led out along a long ledge that projected out into the canyon. This made for beautiful views in all directions. At the end of the path was a large boulder with a flat top. I had seen lightning in the distance, but I thought "I'll just climb up on this boulder very briefly to get the 360 degree view. What are the chances that lightning would strike during the ten seconds I'm up there?"

Well, I climbed up and had a glorious moment looking out over the canyon and then "WHAM BAM SIZZLE FIZZLE ZIP ZAP ZANG". I saw a very bright purple flash in the sky around me, heard an electric hiss, and felt a very strong electric zap hit my head. I was totally fine afterwards, though my heart was racing at a thousand miles per hour (due to adrenalin) and I was quite shocked (literally).

I think the bolt I got struck by must not have been a main bolt because if it had been I would probably dead. It may have been a small tendral reaching out from a bigger bolt, or perhaps a small piece of some cloud to cloud lightning that decided to pay a visit to earth.

Needless to say, I scrambled down from the boulder and ran back away from the canyon's edge as quickly as possible.