Most ground strikes occur immediately below a cumulonimbus cloud. These horizontal strikes are rare and unpredictable, so they shouldn't affect our decisions. Lightning tends to hit elevated sharp terrain features like mountain tops. Lightning tends to hit tall trees in open areas, with objects twice as high receiving roughly 4X the strikes. Lightning tends to hit bushes in the desert if the bush is sticking up higher than the flat ground around it.
Lightning can still hit flat ground or water, but more randomly than it hits elevated objects.
Even a few less feet of height can make a difference in improving your odds of NOT being the struck object. This is why the first part of getting into the lightning position is lowering yourself down. Direct strike - A stepped leader of current connects with a streamer coming out of your body, then the return stroke passed through you or over your body's surface. The return stroke is the most significant electrical event of a lightning strike and has a typical current of 30,000 amps. Streamer currents, while much smaller than the return stroke current, are still large enough to cause injury or death to humans.