THERE WAS A SUDDEN FLASH of light, and then Rod Liberal was falling, his world gone black. He tried to yell, but he was only screaming in his mind. Not yet, it's not my time, he was thinking. When Liberal's climbing rope finally snapped taut, his front tooth slammed into solid rock and chipped—but at least he knew he was alive.

"I woke up and all I saw was sky and my feet," says Liberal. "I had to break something to know I was still there."

It was 3:35 p.m. on July 26, 2003. Liberal, 30, a software developer based in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and 12 friends and co-workers had been climbing Friction Pitch, a 5.5 route on the Grand Teton, in Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park. They'd been trying to make it down before the dark clouds rolled in. But the storm had other ideas: It hit the climbers like an explosion.

Now Liberal was hanging upside down 800 feet below the 13,770-foot summit. He couldn't see his companions—or the devastation they'd been dealt. Erica Summers, a 25-year-old mother of two from Idaho Falls and the second person on Liberal's rope team, had been killed instantly on a ledge above him. Sitting beside Summers, racked with grief, was her 27-year-old husband, Clinton, who'd been leading the climb; he'd been briefly knocked unconscious and had sustained third-degree burns on one leg. Scattered below, around the base of Friction Pitch, Jacob Bancroft, 27, Reagan Lembke, 25, and Justin Thomas, 29, had suffered serious injuries, including broken bones, ripped tendons, and severe burns.

Liberal floated in and out of consciousness, and he wasn't sure how long he'd been hanging there when he heard the voice of Bob Thomas, 51, a climber in his group, relaying what had happened to the team via their two-way radios. "We've been struck by lightning," Thomas reported. "We've got one deceased, maybe two."

That's when Liberal started screaming for real. "I wanted to let them know I was alive," he says.

With the whir and whumping of helicopters, a complex rescue mission was set into action, one that would take more than eight hours and involve more than 45 Teton park rangers and emergency workers. The third time a chopper arrived, ranger Craig Holm, 35, rappelled out of it and appeared at Liberal's side, asking him about his three-month-old son, Kai, to gauge how lucid he was. After four and a half hours dangling on the rope, Liberal was barely alive. His pulse was so weak that Holm could detect only a faint beat from his carotid artery.

Just before 9 p.m., Liberal was flown to the Idaho Falls–based Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center, where he was stabilized before being choppered to the burn ward at the University of Utah Hospital, in Salt Lake City. He'd suffered second-degree burns on his right leg, stomach, chest, and left arm and had a host of secondary problems caused by the massive voltage slamming into his body and coursing through his veins, heart, nerves, spinal cord, and brain. For the next three weeks he was in a medically induced coma, with a tracheotomy tube in his throat to help him breathe and a chest tube to drain the fluid filling his right lung. His kidneys shut down, and he developed pneumonia and pancreatitis. His fall, meanwhile, had caused internal hemorrhaging in his right hip, and his right leg was severely swollen from the tourniquet effect inflicted by his harness after the fall. His doctors weren't sure he was going to make it.

"The only thing that kept me alive on the mountain was the thought of my new son growing up without a father," says Liberal. "What I went through after I was struck were the worst days of my life."