Last weekend, a 59-year-old man was killed by a lightning strike at the top of American Fork Twin Peaks just south of Snowbird Mountain Resort. It’s a hike the man and his brother had done many times, police said.

This sad story led me to look into lightning strike risks in Utah.

Just how frequently do these events occur? And what activities were people doing when they were struck?

Every lightning fatality in Utah since 1996

Lightning strike deaths are rare enough events that they’re well documented.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information (we’ll call it the NCEI from here on out) has compiled a database with every lightning fatality and injury since 1996, based on National Weather Service reports plus sources like emergency management, law enforcement, media, insurance companies, and the public.

Those records show there were 22 lightning deaths in Utah between 1996 and 2024. A separate search of the National Weather Service’s more recent data shows there were no Utah lightning deaths in 2025 or 2026 before Saturday’s incident, either.

Here’s a short record of each of those 23 incidents, written by the NCEI team:

Sunday’s strike marks just the second Utah death of the 2020s, and there was an approximately eight-year gap between deaths from 2016 to 2024.

Overall risks

Perhaps because Utah residents enjoy spending time outdoors, we have a higher rate of being struck and killed by lightning than the rest of the nation overall. Utah’s population of 3.5 million is approximately 1% of the U.S. total, but we were responsible for about 2.23% of the country’s lightning strike deaths between 1996 and 2024.

Being struck by lightning is a pretty rare occurrence. The National Weather Service estimates that the chance of lightning striking a person in the U.S. in a given year is about one in 1.2 million. Do the math, and the odds that an average person is struck in their estimated 80-year lifespan are one in 15,000.

That’s just the odds of being struck by lightning, though. About 90% of those who are struck end up surviving, albeit many with long-lasting injuries.

Interestingly, men are far more likely to be struck and killed by lightning than women, by an 80-20 ratio. The most common age group to be struck was those between the ages of 20 and 29. From the National Lightning Safety Council report:

As you’d probably expect, the summer months have by far the most lightning fatalities, with July being the most frequent month. Saturday is the most frequent day of the week.

Sixty-three percent of deaths occurred during leisure activities, with 19% of the remaining fatalities happening during work, and 15% during a daily routine. Of all of the activities that resulted in lightning strike deaths nationally, fishing was the most common in the NLSC’s study:

While the data for Utah’s fatalities is limited by sample size, the most common activity that lightning strike victims were doing here is hiking or camping, which has led to five of the 23 deaths each. Interestingly, while camping ranks fifth nationally, hiking isn’t in the national top 12 — only 3% of national lightning strike fatalities occurred while someone was hiking.

Finally, one important other thing to note: Many lightning strike deaths occur when people are actually moving to safety or have already sought shelter. About 10 of the 22 Utah deaths are included in this total, and about 150 of the national NCEI narratives mention the victim being struck while moving to safety.

As NLSC researcher John Jensenius Jr. writes, “The key to being safe in a thunderstorm is to get to a safe place before the lightning threat becomes significant. … For many of the lightning victims, safe shelters were available; however, the victims simply did not act soon enough to get to safety before they were struck.”

Acting — and acting quickly — are the two keys necessary to save lives when lightning storms come around.