This happened a couple weeks ago, and I still can't decide if it was dangerously foolish or not.
Me and a friend were climbing Mount Adams (NH), and we had a terrible forecast for the afternoon but hoped to beat it with an early start. Unsettling (but not necessarily alarming) clouds are moving towards us early. Near the top of King's Ravine it starts sprinkling and we hear a very distant rumble of thunder. We keep going, deciding that even if it gets bad we don't want to descend that route. Ten or so minutes later, right before we top out of the ravine, we see one still distant but slightly closer flash of lightning. Initially I call it, but we decide to sit and see what happens. We wait a while (~10 minutes) in the now steady rain and observe no more electrical activity, nor do we the entire rest of the climb. Seeing that the storm doesn't seem to be increasing, and knowing that there is a relatively quick descent to protection should it do so, we decide to go on.
This moment is the first decision I'm unsure of. It seems, to at least some degree, reckless, but to what extent? Was this a potentially lethal bad decision, or is it understandable in the scope of the inherent risks one faces mountaineering?
The rest of the climb went as follows: we continue up with the storm steadily increasing and eventually turn around a couple hundred feet from the summit due to hail, heavy rain, and high winds. We descend back to the top of the ravine, at which point the storm has calmed considerably (back to a sprinkle). I decide to race back up alone while my partner begins descending the Airline. Storm again increases (but not quite to the point which it had before), the last few hundred feet of vertical is totally socked in, and I get to spend the most harshly beautiful and sublime three minutes of my life on the summit. Descent was uneventful except for the strongest winds I've had the pleasure to experience.
What of the second decision to ascend? There are additional risks going alone, but at the same time we had now experienced the storm cycle a bit and had gone ~45 minutes without any lightning.
If this had been a Rocky Mountain peak I would have descended as soon as I realized I could not beat the storm clouds back down, regardless of lightning or not. Additionally, if the route had been more committed I would not have attempted it in questionable conditions. I think I viewed this as a "normal" (meaning not a violent one specifically caused by the uplift mechanism granted by a mountain range) storm which I happened to be on a mountain during, and the absence of electrical activity made me think that the decisions to ascend were within the realm of acceptable risks. `
What do you think?
Also, I'm sorry for the wall of text, but I was trying to include as many of the relevant details as possible so as to gain the most insightful feedback.
Thanks.