Impaled his own trekking pole, American hiker walks 16 km for surgery | World News

3 min readJul 30, 2026 10:46 AM David Cifaldi was hiking Montana’s tallest mountain on July 20 with two of his friends when he slipped on a rock after nearly seven hours on the trail. The first thing he noticed after the fall was not his injuries, but his missing trekking pole. Events took a horrific turn when he realised that his ‘missing’ trekking pole wasn’t actually missing; rather it had impaled him.
“Oh, this thing is sticking out of me,” he said.
The 32-year-old nurse at St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings, Mont, immediately assessed the injury. The pole pierced through his left side muscle below the armpit and protruded out his back, missing his chest cavity and lung. He was able to take deep breaths.
What made matters worse was that help was far, far away. Cifaldi was still two to three miles (3-4 km) from the summit of Granite Peak and at an altitude of about 12,800 feet.
His three friends began their ascent at 2 am with plans to camp overnight at Froze-to-Death Plateau before attempting the summit.
One of Cifaldi’s friends, Jesse Ross, who had reached the top successfully, was leading him and his other friend Brad Reich up the mountain.
They reached the plateau sunrise.
“As you get up there, you feel like you’re in, like, ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ or something like that,” Cifaldi told The New York Times. “It’s just mountains and green.” Cifaldi and both his friends were closing in on the summit when he lost his footing.Story continues below this ad

His friends immediately used a GPS phone and sent an SOS signal to put search-and-rescue teams on stand.
“I was pretty confident it was not in my chest or lung,” he said. Wanting to avoid an expensive helicopter rescue, Cifaldi decided to hike down with his friends, believing he could safely make the descent.
“I think we can get out of here,” he told them.
The 6-hour descent
The three of them hiked down the mountain for over six hours. Ross went ahead and warned hikers that Cifaldi was coming down the trail with an injury that looked “gnarly”.Story continues below this ad
After trekking for about 10 miles, Cifaldi was rushed to the nearest hospital.
The medical staff at the local hospital refused to extract the pole due to bleeding risks, following which Cifaldi was taken to his own workplace—St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings.
“At that point I was fed up,” he said. “I was, like, please somebody just take this thing out of me.”
The doctors then used conscious sedation to safely pull the pole out and then inserted a drainage tube.Story continues below this ad
“When I came back to, that was the first time I had pain,” Cifaldi said. He was adamant about returning to work the next day, but doctors ordered him to rest for a week.
(With inputs from The New York Times)
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