[pct-l] Lightening risks using external frame pack?

[Ben Crowell]

Paul Robison wrote:
>Upon searching out my window neither the lightning rod on my house nor none of the four neighbors have any kind of knife edge,  the all have balls on the end... This is true of my
>+grandparents house in the Midwest as well ( which has been struck).

Interesting...I live in California, where nobody has lightning rods :-)

My answer was based on theory, but it looks like reality is more complicated.
WP has a good discussion of this:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod#Should_a_lightning_rod_have_a_point.3F
Apparently there was quite a controversy about this historically.

One big difference between a house's lightning rod and the frame of a pack is
that the lightning rod is connected to ground.