I was running the dogs at the Redgate one morning a few weeks ago. About 25 minutes into our outing, the wind began to blow, the western sky, already grey, darkened and began to rumble. There was some impressive lightning about 10-15 miles away. I pulled out my phone and recorded some video of the weather. A morning thunderstorm is something of a rarity in southern Colorado.

Then the winds picked up and it began to rain. The thunder closed in. The Redgate trails are pretty exposed and would be one of the last places you’d want to find yourself in the middle of a thunderstorm, so I cut the outing short, telling the dogs, “truck, truck!” And for the first time ever at the Redgate, I actually ran to the truck, about three-quarters of a mile. The dogs were giving me “what-the-hell-is-this-guy-doing-running?” looks.

We all made it back to the truck that morning without being hit by lightning or suffering cardiac arrest. Now that I think about it, getting struck by lightning after having a heart attack might not be such a bad thing. Something akin to a natural defibrillation, I suppose.

It turned out my footage wasn’t that impressive. There were some nice flashes of lightning, but spaced 45-60 seconds apart. The video was a bit shaky and the audio was wind-blown. I was going to delete the files when I decided to scrub the video and grab a frame of the lightning.

The result wasn’t great but was serviceable. A lightning strike is almost always impressive. But the frame lacks sharpness and there’s that odd horizontal flare. Still, when you consider that it was an event some 15 miles away and the scale of the bolt, it was a striking moment.