David Cifaldi is 32 years old. He is an emergency room nurse. On July 20, 2026, he was crossing Montana's Froze-to-Death Plateau on his way to the summit of Granite Peak when he slipped on loose rock at around 11,800 feet.
Picture by Jesse Ross
His own 44-inch steel-tipped trekking pole went through the flesh beneath his left arm, missed every vital organ, and came out through his back.
The moment he decided to walk out
He rolled over. He felt the pole under his skin.
His two hiking partners showed him a photograph of the injury on their phones. His first assessment, straight from the ER, was that the pole had missed his chest wall. His second was cleaner. Tis but a flesh wound, he told them.
That is not bravado.
That is a wound-care instinct running the math out loud. Cifaldi later told the Associated Press that a helicopter airlift would have cost a small fortune, and that the injury did not look life-threatening from his side of the pole.
So the group turned around and started walking.
They left the pole in place, which is the correct decision for a penetrating injury, and they began the descent.
Ten miles, six and a half hours
The three men crossed snowfields, boulder fields, and rugged alpine terrain on their way down.
One friend used a Garmin inReach satellite communicator to alert Stillwater County Search and Rescue. Another stayed at Cifaldi's side.
The rescue team monitored the group every 30 minutes by satellite.
According to friend Jesse Ross, Cifaldi even asked one of the hikers to walk ahead near Mystic Lake so that children on the trail would not have to see his injuries.
He reached the trailhead under his own power.
From there, an ambulance drove him two hours to Intermountain Health in Billings. Doctors removed the pole after it had been lodged in his body for almost nine hours.
The medical read on what he did
Emergency medicine has a clear protocol for penetrating injuries.
You do not remove the object at the scene. It may be tamponading a bleed, and pulling it out can turn a survivable wound into a fatal one.
Cifaldi's day job made him one of the few laypeople on that mountain qualified to make the call.
He was, in effect, his own field medic. His crew held the line on evacuation while he held the line on his own vitals.
Why runners should read this
Granite Peak is not a running route.
But the plateau it sits on is the same terrain a trail runner might cross on a big mountain outing, and the lesson transfers.
Trekking poles are safer than not using them on most descents, but they are also the object most likely to injure you in a hard fall. If you carry them, you should know how to fall away from them the same way you know how to fall away from ice skates.
If you are moving into ultra distances or big mountain days, our beginner's guide to how to start trail running is a fair primer on gear choices, and it covers the safer end of what Cifaldi was doing that morning. The gear lessons
A satellite communicator is not optional above the treeline anymore.
Cifaldi's group had one, and it turned a solo emergency into a supervised evacuation.
A partner or a small group is the other non-negotiable.
He would not have made the descent on his own, no matter what his job title was.
Falling technique matters more than fitness
In alpine terrain, most serious injuries come from a bad fall, not a bad workout.
Learning to release your grip on your poles when you slip is the single most important habit you can build, and it is the one most casual users skip.
The instinct is to hold on.
The correct move is to let go, because a pole is a lever and a lever plus a body weight equals a much bigger injury than a fall on its own.
The mental discipline that saved his day
The part of this story that gets under-told is the calm. Cifaldi did not panic.
His friends did not panic, because he told them the injury was survivable and gave them a plan.
For six and a half hours, he ran his own triage.
He kept his breathing steady, he watched the wound for changes, and he asked his crew to hide the injury from strangers on the trail so that nobody around him would spiral either.
That is a professional skill. It is also a portable one.
Runners who cultivate any version of it, even without medical training, tend to make better decisions on race day and in the small emergencies that come with big mountain days.
The recovery
Cifaldi told reporters he was back at work within days.
He faces significant medical bills and the possibility of additional surgery, which he has been open about.
Asked whether he would make the same call again, he said he would.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he told the Associated Press. He added that search and rescue is free, and that his choice was about the injury, not the money.
Some of us train for hours to be able to run marathons.
Cifaldi trained, without meaning to, to be able to walk one out with a steel pole through his torso.
