DENVER -- The wife of a Summit County man who was injured in a weekend fall on a 14,265-foot mountain said she could see him from a window of their home.

Marty Eisenberg recalled his 100-foot slide down Quandary Peak from his hospital bed in Denver several days later.

Video

Climber Discusses Fall

The 65-year-old has climbed 35 of Colorado's 54 Fourteeners -- mountains above 14,000 feet elevation -- for 20 years, but something went wrong Sunday as he descended from the Summit County peak. Snow gave way and he plunged head-first down a snow chute, hitting rocks on the way down.

Eisenberg suffered a broken collarbone, four or five broken ribs, and may have fractured his shoulder blade in the accident.

"What was going through my mind was, 'Oh hell, I know I'm really seriously hurt," Eisenberg told reporters from his hospital bed at St. Anthony Central Hospital. "I needed help to get off the mountain."

His climbing partner, Larry Jones, of Colorado Springs, carefully made his way down to Eisenberg, gave him his windbreaker and wrapped him in a space blanket. Then he used a two-way radio to call Eisenberg's wife at their home, two miles from the mountain.

Using binoculars, Pam Herring, 51, could see her husband on the snow field and called 911 for help. That was at about 12:30 p.m. It would be 6 p.m. before the first rescuers reached her husband after battling snow, lightning and avalanche conditions.

As darkness fell, rescuers told Herring that it would be morning before the litter carrying her husband would be all the way down. By 10 p.m., they were only a third of the way down the mountain with Eisenberg.

The rescue effort didn't take as long as expected and he was finally taken off the mountain and put in an ambulance at 1:30 a.m.

Asked if the accident had changed his feelings about mountain climbing, he smiled and said, "It's going to slow me down this summer, and we'll see how my ribs go, (but) I'll get back into it."

Eisenberg said that he hopes to continue climbing Colorado mountains until he is 80.