

If you’re caught outside during a thunderstorm, the best plan of action is to move as fast as you can to a safer place
institutions such as the American Hiking Society and the city of Bellmead in Texas continue to include it in their lightning safety guidelines.
A lot of times when hiking or backpacking, you may be hours from a safer place. In those cases, it probably is better to crouch than to try to run down a mountain during a thunderstorm.
The actual crouching to lower your height may not help much, but keeping your feet close together to minimize surface contact probably does help reduce your chances of dying to a nearby strike.
The most common cause of deaths from lightning is from ground current, where lightning travels through the ground, goes up one leg, and back down the other leg back into the ground. My understanding on it is that different parts of the ground have different conductivity, and if your feet are on patches of ground with different charge levels the lightning can go through your legs as the most conductive path between the two points. For similar reasons, I was once told that the safest way to move across the ground near a downed power pole (if you absolutely had to for some reason) was either to shuffle your feet while keeping them as close together as possible, or to hop on one foot.