Man gets impaled by his own trekking pole, then hikes ten miles to safety
Dave Cifaldi, a wound-care nurse from Montana, was climbing his home state’s highest peak when a freak accident left him with one of his hiking poles impaled in his side.
Cifaldi was ascending Granite Peak, a mountain whose highest point is 12,799 feet in the air, with two of his friends. After about ten miles of climbing, Cifaldi slipped on some rocks. An easy mistake to make, and one that more often than not would only lead to some bruises to both one’s body and one’s ego.
However, as Cifaldi stood up, he realised that he could only see one of his trekking poles lying on the ground. When he turned and saw the horrified looks on his friend’s faces, he realised that the other pole had impaled his side and was poking out of his back.
Fortunately, Cifaldi’s day job had prepared him for this moment. Speaking to CNN, he said, “I think my nurse brain clicked on, as soon as I was able to self-assess and establish that this was not life-threatening right now, I was pretty convinced I was going to get off that mountain under my own power.”
Reasoning that removing the pole would only make matters worse, Cifaldi and one of his friends carefully hiked the ten-mile trail back to the trailhead, while the other used a satellite phone to contact search and rescue.
After a six-and-a-half-hour trip, Cifaldi arrived and was first taken to the hospital, before the pole was removed safely at Intermountain Health in Billings.
Not before several photos were taken, of course.
Despite such a traumatic experience, “I feel very lucky,” Cifaldi said in the same interview. “A couple inches the other way and this would be a different story.”
He is currently recovering at home, keen to return to caring for his patients soon.