A Montana man's hike up the state's highest mountain turned into a 10-mile hike out with a trekking pole stuck through his body. Emergency room nurse David Cifaldi slipped near the summit of Granite Peak on July 20 and landed on one of his poles, which entered below his left arm and exited his lower back, narrowly missing vital organs, the Guardian reports. Cifaldi, who was hiking with two friends, tells KTVQ that his medical training helped him determine that the injury wasn't immediately life-threatening. "Through my skin I could feel the trekking pole," he says. "I knew it wasn't deep, and I knew I could take deep breaths."
"I feel very lucky," he says. "A couple inches the other way and this would be a different story." After using a satellite device to alert authorities, the 32-year-old opted to walk six and a half hours back to the trailhead. His friends walked with him—one behind to make sure he was steady on rough terrain and watch for bleeding, one ahead to warn families on a popular part of the trail about the "gnarly" scene. "He was very calm and collected the entire time," says one of the friends, Brad Reich. Cifaldi tells Backpacker magazine that a few hours into the hike out, when they were confident they would make it, they started making "kebab jokes" to lighten the mood. Surgeons in Billings later removed the pole.
"The pole went all the way through his lat, sticking out both ends, with roughly 8 inches between the two holes," another friend, Jesse Ross, wrote in a GoFundMe fundraiser to help Cifaldi with medical bills. "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." The accident happened when they were around 1,000 feet from the summit. Cifaldi says they plan to try again when his wound is fully healed.
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