You trip on a rocky alpine slope, fall hard, and realize your own gear has just speared clean through your body. Most people would panic and scream for a helicopter. David Cifaldi stayed remarkably calm, left the metal shaft lodged right where it was, and walked ten miles down a brutal Montana mountain.
Accidents happen fast in the backcountry. When Cifaldi, a 32-year-old nurse from Billings, was climbing Granite Peak—Montana's highest and notoriously unforgiving mountain—he slipped on loose rocks at roughly 11,800 feet elevation. During the fall, a steel-tipped trekking pole pierced the flesh beneath his arm, passed through his torso, and protruded from his back. Roughly eight inches of metal bridged his entry and exit wounds.
Instead of waiting hours for an expensive and complicated aerial extraction, he relied on medical training, cool logic, and two loyal friends to walk himself out.
Assessing a Worst-Case Scenario
Panic is the primary enemy in any wilderness medical emergency. Adrenaline spikes, bad decisions follow, and minor situations turn fatal. Cifaldi's professional background in wound care kicked in almost instantly.
He performed a rapid self-assessment right there on the rocks:
- Was he breathing normally? Yes.
- Was he bleeding profusely in pools? No.
- Was the pole shifting violently or threatening his airway and chest cavity? He concluded it sat outside his vital organs and main chest wall.
That evaluation changed everything. He realized the injury, while grotesque and terrifying to look at, was stable.
The Golden Rule of Impaled Objects
If you see someone stuck on a sharp object, your first instinct might be to yank it out. Do not do that.
First responders and emergency medicine experts universally advise leaving impaled objects completely untouched in the field. Pulling a foreign object out of a wound acts like removing a cork from a bottle. It often triggers massive, uncontrolled internal hemorrhaging or shifts bone fragments and tissue, worsening structural damage.
Cifaldi knew this rule by heart. By leaving the trekking pole lodged firmly in his torso, the metal shaft acted as a makeshift plug, tamponading bleeding vessels until he reached a proper surgical team.
Managing the Descent
With a satellite communicator (a Garmin inReach), his hiking companions, Jesse Ross and Brad Reich, alerted Stillwater County Search and Rescue. Authorities staged resources and maintained check-ins every thirty minutes, but because Cifaldi remained lucid, communicated clearly, and insisted on walking, search commanders respected his autonomy.
Then came the real test. The trio faced a six-and-a-half-hour, ten-mile descent across grueling alpine terrain filled with boulder fields, snow patches, and steep drops.
Cifaldi maintained his composure the entire way. Showing remarkable situational awareness, he even asked one of his friends to walk ahead of the group near heavy traffic zones to warn families and children so they wouldn't experience the shock of seeing a man walking with a pole through his body.
Getting Definitive Care
Upon reaching the trailhead, friends drove him to a local clinic before he transferred to St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings. Surgeons successfully removed the trekking pole after it spent nearly nine hours lodged inside his tissue. Because he avoided major organ damage and secondary trauma from field extraction, his recovery was remarkably fast. He returned to work just days later.
This incident highlights a harsh backcountry truth. Gear designed to keep you safe can occasionally turn dangerous. More importantly, absolute composure and basic medical literacy save lives when things go sideways miles away from the nearest road.
Keep your wits about you, respect the mountain, and always pack a satellite messenger.
