Treetop camping during lightning.

We all know it is prudent to abandon the treetop during an approaching lightning storm. This means getting out of the tree quickly which could be a bit more tricky if you were in a wilderness setting in the middle of the night and you had to leave your gear aloft so you could take flight at a moments notice.

Here’s the question/riddle. Lightning generally takes the most logical straightforward route to ground itself out. This usually means down a major branch or leader then down the trunk. If you had your hammock hanging off a branch and/or your hammock straps were a little out from the trunk as in a Treeboat, would you possibly be out of harms way in that you are not grounded and your attachment is hanging below the main conducting surface?

Good Question for those with more know how in electricity and conductivity. I am not willing to risk it to find out.

The old saying that lightning (electricity) “takes the path of least resistance" is misleading; actually, it's basically incorrect: Electricity takes all the paths it can.

A good analogy is water flowing through pipes: If you had a bunch of pipes, all connected at one point to one water supply, and some pipes had low resistance (big pipes) and some had high resistance (small pipes), water would not flow just through the biggest pipe; it would flow through all of them. Just more of it would flow through the big ones than through the little ones.

It would take too much to explain it here, but take my word for it that it is quite possible that, during a strike, the branch at one end of your hammock could be at a very different voltage from the other end. It goes without saying that whatever is in the hammock is at grave (carefully chosen word) risk.

A few years ago, I got caught in a thunderstorm near a ridgeline. The fact that I know a thing or two about electricity and lightning, and what precautions to take, did not at all make me feel any more safe. I *really* wanted to be someplace—just about anyplace—else.

Stay out of the tree.

Trees do occasionally explode, or otherwise fall apart when hit by lightning. Where you are in the tree or how much electricity happens to be there is going to be of little difference if this happens.

I'll emphatically second the advice already given here: GET OUT OF THE TREE.

It's true that most of the electrical current flow in a lightning stroke will be along the path of least resistance. The catch is where that path comes from, and the fact that multiple paths often form. Air, even wet air, is a pretty good insulator, and part of how lightning bolts form is by ionization of the air in a channel. Basically, the electrons are blasted off of the atoms by electrical energy, and once that happens the resulting plasma is a much better conductor. That ionization channel forms fast, and where it forms is pretty unpredictable.

Then there's what happens to the tree. In most species most of the time, the electricity will discharge through the cambium or along the surface of the bark, because these are very wet (guys who studied the interaction of pine bark beetles and lightning simulated lightning effects by wrapping detonator cord around tree trunks and blasting the bark off). But if much current moves through sapwood or heartwood it'll blow the tree up, as Leon points out.

As an aside: There's a common misconception that cars are good places to be in a lightning storm because the insulating qualities of the rubber tires prevent grounding of the current. Not so. Cars are good places to be in a lightning storm because the metal frame conducts any strikes around you instead of through you - the frame makes a pretty good "Faraday cage". I suppose you could hoist a heavy metal cage up into the tree and be reasonably safe in a storm - provided the lightning didn't melt the rope/webbing holding the thing up or blow the tree into splinters.

Count me a coward on this one. John Muir apparently liked to climb big trees in thunderstorms and I'm sure it was a rush, but I don't like to lean on my luck that hard.

i suppose one could string up a cable and ground it below the tree?