Don’t tell Marty Eisenberg, the 65-year-old Summit County climber rescued from a snowy chute on Quandary Peak on Sunday, that he shouldn’t be messing around with mountains at his age.
“Use it or lose it,” the indomitable, ponytailed Eisenberg said Wednesday in his hospital room at St. Anthony Central Hospital in Denver.
Eisenberg is being treated for broken ribs, a broken collarbone and a shoulder injury sustained in a 50- to 100-foot slide down Quandary’s Monte Cristo Couloir, a popular spring route for snow climbers and ski mountaineers.
“I hope to be doing this for another 15 years,” he said.
Reporters asked him if he ever thought about giving up while waiting to be rescued. He didn’t.
Pam Herring learned of her husband’s accident via a two-way radio call from his climbing partner.
She called 911.
“It wasn’t scary to me at all,” said Herring, who said she watched through binoculars as rescuers lowered her husband in a litter. “There was no reason for it to be scary to me. We choose to climb, and things happen.”
Eisenberg fell on his way back down the couloir, after reaching Quandary’s 14,265-foot summit with his climbing partner around noon Sunday.
Eisenberg lost his balance in a sun-rotted patch of snow, sending him into a high-speed slide down the chute on his back that ended only when he collided with some exposed rocks, he said.
“I knew that I was seriously injured,” he said. “Fortunately, I was in radio contact with my wife.”
Though his accident lacked the drama and uncertainty of most alpine disaster epics, Eisenberg said he could not have gotten off the mountain on his own, and thanked the volunteer rescuers who hauled their gear up the mountain Sunday so they could haul him down.
Staff writer Jim Hughes can be reached at 303-820-1244 or jhughes@denverpost.com.
