- A trekking pole impaled a man's side after he fell on a hike in the rugged Montana mountains.
- The man and two friends hiked 10 miles down rough terrain rather than wait for rescue.
- The pole was removed at a Billings hospital and the hiker is recovering.
Three hikers set out last week to summit 12,807-foot Granite Peak, the highest point in Montana.
The route took them past Mystic Lake, up to the Froze to Death Plateau and across about 10 miles of rugged terrain toward Tempest Peak in the Beartooth Mountains. At the 11,800-feet elevation, they stopped to plan their approach to the saddle.
One of the hikers, David Cifaldi, stepped on small loose rock, dropped his trekking pole and fell forward. The pole went all the way through his lat, sticking out both ends, with roughly 8 inches between the two holes, according to fellow hiker Jesse Ross, who set up a GoFundMe account for his friend after the July 20 incident.
“It was just kind of a freak thing, something you’d more expect to roll your ankle versus having a catastrophic injury,” Cifaldi said, per KCENNews. “As I rolled over, I noticed one of my trekking poles laying on the ground, and as I kind of sat up, I realize that the other one was stuck in my side.”
Cifaldi is a former emergency room nurse who now works in wound care at a clinic. His training took over.
“He self-assessed calmly: no bleeding, full feeling, no lightheadedness, nothing vital hit, and the pole stable in place. Given his condition, he made the call to self-rescue rather than wait for extraction — hiking 10 miles back to the trailhead with a trekking pole still through his body," Ross wrote.
Keep calm and hike on
Cifaldi said his “nurse brain” clicked on. After he established that “‘Hey, this is not life-threatening right now,’ I was pretty convinced at that point that I was going to get off that mountain and I was going to do it under my own power.”
Fellow hiker Brad Reich described how Cifaldi didn’t panic.
“He kept very calm and he set the tone for how we handled it coming back,” Reich told KCEN. “Once he established that he felt like he was OK, he was still talking. He was still breathing. There was not a pool of blood. So, at that point, he made the decision that he goes, ‘OK, we got to get off the mountain.’”
The hikers used a Garmin inReach, a satellite communication device to send text messages and share GPS location, to alert Stillwater County Search and Rescue, which staged a team in case Cifaldi’s condition changed. They checked in every 30 minutes on the hike down.
“David navigated the plateau’s snowfields and boulder fields, made his way down past Mystic Lake, and reached the trailhead entirely under his own power — never once complaining, staying in remarkably high spirits. Near Mystic Lake, he even asked one of us to hike ahead and warn other hikers, so no children would have to see the wound," according to Ross.
Ross told KCEN that the hikers had to navigate boulder fields, snow fields and switchbacks with precision on the way down to ensure Cifaldi didn’t fall again. “He was just so focused and locked in. It was just incredible that he was able to do it for that long,” Ross said.
After hiking more than six hours, Cifaldi was driven two hours to a hospital in Billings. The impaled pole was in place eight to nine hours from the time he fell to when it was removed.
Cifaldi said he couldn’t have made it alone. “Jesse walked ahead of us and kind of set the path for our way back down. Brad walked behind me and just kind of monitored the wound the whole time,” he said.
“I feel very lucky. I feel like somebody was definitely watching out for me because, like I said, couple inches the other way and this would be a different story,” Cifaldi said. “So, I feel very fortunate, very, very blessed to have good, good friends, good people that helped me.”