It was bad enough that her second-grade teacher didn’t like her because she refused to sit on his lap to go over test grades. But when she had trouble learning to spell, he shamed her in front of the class, calling her stupid.
Actually, Meghan Buchanan was dyslexic, and she would overcome her learning disability to become a rocket scientist. She would apply the same determination she used to earn a degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado to climb the highest peak on every continent, including the world’s tallest mountain, Mount Everest.
She would also become a motivational speaker, preaching a message she has trademarked as GGRIT — gratitude, growth, resilience, integrity and tenacity. When she poses for photos on mountaintops, she pulls out a banner that reads, “Dyslexia Gave Me GGRIT.” She also has displayed that message at the South Pole, and hopes to do it at the North Pole next spring.
“I was taught at a young age to not give up,” said Buchanan, 50, who lives near Vail in Edwards. “When I talk to schools, I really go deep into trying to explain to these kids that you are going to hurt. You’re going to fail. I make them say with me, ‘I’m going to fail.’ Then I make them say, ‘And I’m going to get back up.’”
Meghan Buchanan on the summit of Mount Everest, left, with Pasang Sherpa, center, and climbing guide Naren Thakuri in 2022. (Provided by Meghan Buchanan)
If she makes it to the North Pole, she will complete what the elite adventure world calls the Explorer’s Grand Slam — the highest peak on every continent (the “Seven Summits”) plus ski treks to both poles. She reached the South Pole in 2021 and the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, in 2022.
Growing up in Colorado, she fell in love with the outdoors going on hikes with her father, who was an electrical engineer. They did fourteeners together, and he told her she was good at it.
“The outdoors was my therapy growing up,” Buchanan said. “That is where I felt naturally good at something. I wasn’t being judged, it was effortless and I could just be me. That’s where I learned to build my confidence, through the outdoors. It was something my dad loved to do. My brother and my sister weren’t as into it, so it was our thing.”
When she was diagnosed with dyslexia at age 7, the doctor said she would never achieve much academically. Her mother had different ideas.
“My mom sat me down and she was like, ‘Sweetheart, you can be anything you want to be. You are just going to have to work harder than everybody else. That starts today in this house,’” Buchanan said. “My mom did her best to normalize it for me. My mom was my great advocate.”
Her mother, Carol, describes her as “a very sweet child” who learned early on that the world could be a cruel place.
“Although she was extremely smart, there was something holding her back,” her mother said. “Since kindergarten, she had to work two to three times as hard as everyone else. It just became kind of a normal activity for her, to have to work harder, and not to be discouraged if somebody else could do something more quickly than she could.”
She endured shame and embarrassment because of her dyslexia. Even after she began her career as an aerospace engineer, she hid it from peers for years. By then she had been diagnosed with ADHD, too. The term for people dealing with issues like those is neurodivergent.
“Neurodivergence is typically when brains just function in a different way, especially when it comes to learning or comprehension,” said Buchanan, who works for Raytheon, a major aerospace and defense company. “Under this umbrella of neurodivergence is dyslexia, ADHD, autism spectrum, many different things. But it’s really where our brains process things differently. People who are normal, we call that neuro-typical brains. The mountains helped me truly come fully into who I am as a neuro-divergent.”
That wasn’t the only massive challenge she would have to overcome, though.
In 2011, she suffered a severely broken leg while skiing deep powder in the Back Bowls at Vail. She hit a downed tree that was covered with snow, shearing the head of her femur and suffering a spiral fracture. Muscles were ripped off the bone and she bled internally. After emergency surgery, she woke up with a 14-inch titanium rod in her leg. Doctors told he she was lucky to be alive, but said she would have to walk with a cane the rest of her life.
“I was like, ‘No, that’s not my life. The work starts today,’” she said.
If only it were that simple. There were major complications. She didn’t heal the way doctors expected. A year and a half went by and she was still enduring excruciating pain. Then one day her physical therapist had a thought: What if she was allergic to titanium? Doctors scoffed at the idea, but Buchanan demanded they remove it anyway.
Meghan Buchanan at the South Pole in 2021. She hopes to reach the North Pole next April to complete the Explorer’s Grand Slam. (Provided by Meghan Buchanan)
“Some people would look at being neurodivergent as a lack of a skill set,” said Shannon Foley Henn, a friend of 20 years. “I think that is what allowed her to be so in tune with herself and so much of an advocate for herself. That was what gave her the strength to tell her doctors, against their wishes, that they needed to remove that rod from her leg.”
She had gotten through engineering school with dyslexia and ADHD. She had worked for defense contractors that included Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Boeing on projects such as “survivability engineering” for spacecraft and military aircraft. There was no way she was going to give up her active lifestyle and passion for the mountains without a fight.
“She was like, no one is going to tell me I’m not going to be able to go further than this,” Foley Henn said. “That was a lesson she had been learning all her life, and she brought it to that injury. Once she recovered from that injury, that’s what she applied it to mountaineering. Had they not removed that rod, there is no way she would have gone on to finish all of the Seven Summits.”
The Seven Summits was first completed in 1985 by Dick Bass, a Texas businessman and mountaineer who helped found Vail as one of its original investors. Later that year, Boulder’s Gerry Roach became the second to do it.
Buchanan’s intuition about that titanium rod was right, and she thrived after it was removed. She climbed Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa. She hiked to Everest base camp. She decided to climb Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest peak in South America.
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Drinking wine in Mendoza after the climb, she ran into a woman who had just done Aconcagua to complete the Seven Summits. Buchanan mentioned she thought Aconcagua was easy, even though it tops out at more than 22,800 feet.
“She said, ‘If that was easy for you, and you start training technically, you could do the Seven Summits,’” Buchanan said. “I was like, ‘I’m doing the Seven Summits.’ Pushing myself on the mountain helped bring me out of my shell of dyslexia for work. After Aconcagua, I felt so empowered. I was 40 and I was faster than the 25-year-olds. I was like, ‘I’m tired of being ashamed of anything but who I am. That’s when I took a stand at work and started speaking out about neuro-divergence.”
She pursues adventure in an era when it seems to have gone out of style.
“It has, hasn’t it?” she said. “My message is using the tools of GGRIT, which is practicing gratitude, being willing to grow, having resilience to get back up every time you fall — or every time you think you can’t (do something) — and integrity. I was raised with integrity, and that also has gone out of style, hasn’t it? Integrity is often the harder path, the longer path, the more painful path. It’s learning to be honest with yourself about who you are. When you do that, you can be honest with others.
“Tenacity is the T in GGRIT,” she continued, “because to be able to repeat that GGRIT cycle over and over, it is tenacity that pulls you through and gives you that fire in the belly. What people don’t understand is the power of the choice they have. Every day we have a choice. GGRIT is a choice, so choose to rise. Choose to get back up, again and again.”