Wounded Nurse Hikes 10 Miles to Safety After Impaling Himself on Trekking Pole

On the slopes of Montana's Granite Peak, a wound nurse named David Cifaldi fell upon his own trekking pole and found himself alone, impaled, and miles from help at nearly 13,000 feet. What followed was not a rescue in the conventional sense, but a self-reckoning — a man applying the same clinical knowledge he'd spent years offering others to the urgent problem of his own survival. He walked ten miles down the mountain, wounded and deliberate, arriving at safety through a combination of professional expertise and the refusal to let fear make his decisions for him. His story asks us to consider