Neurodivergent Rocket Scientist Completes Seven Summits, Looks at Explorer’s Grand Slam

It was bad enough that her second-grade teacher didn’t like her because she refused to sit on his lap to go over the grades. But when she had trouble learning to spell, he shamed her in front of the class and called her stupid.

Actually, Meghan Buchanan was dyslexic, and she would overcome her learning disability to become a rocket scientist. She would use 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 tallest mountain in the world, Mount Everest.

She would also become a motivational speaker and preach message she has identified as GGRIT: gratitude, growth, resilience, integrity and tenacity. As she poses for photos on mountaintops, she pulls out a banner that reads: “Dyslexia Gave Me GGRIT.” She also showed that message at the South Pole and hopes to do so at the North Pole next spring.

“I learned at a young age not to give up,” said Buchanan, 50, who lives near Vail in Edwards. “When I talk to schools, I really try to explain to these kids that you’re going to get hurt. You’re going to fail. I let them say with me, “I’m going to fail.” Then I let them say: ‘And I’m going to get up again.’

If she makes it to the North Pole, she’ll complete what the elite adventure world calls the Explorer’s Grand Slam: the highest peak on every continent (the ‘Seven Summits’) plus ski trips to both poles. She reached the South Pole in 2021 and the summit of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, in 2022.

Growing up in Colorado, she fell in love with the outdoors while hiking with her father, who was an electrical engineer. They did fourteen together and he told her she was good at it.

“The outdoors was my therapy growing up,” Buchanan said. “I naturally felt good about that. I wasn’t judged, it was effortless and I could just be myself. There I learned to build my self-confidence, through the outdoors. It was something my father loved to do. My brother and sister weren’t really into it, so it was our business.”

When she was diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of seven, the doctor said she would never achieve much academically. Her mother had other ideas.

“My mother sat me down and said, ‘Honey, you can be anything you want. You’ll just have to work harder than everyone else. That starts today in this house,” Buchanan said. “My mother did her best to normalize it for me. My mother was my great advocate.”

Her mother, Carol, describes her as “a very sweet child” who learned early that the world could be a cruel place.

“Even though 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 thing for her, to have to work harder and not get discouraged when someone else could do something faster than her.”

She has endured shame and embarrassment because of her dyslexia. Even after starting her career as an aerospace engineer, she hid it from colleagues for years. By then she had also been diagnosed with ADHD. The term for people dealing with these types of issues is neurodivergent.

“Neurodivergence is typically when the brain simply functions in a different way, especially when it comes to learning or understanding,” says Buchanan, who works for Raytheon, a major aerospace and defense company. “Under this umbrella of neurodivergence are dyslexia, ADHD, autism spectrum and many different things. But it’s really where our brains process things differently. People who are normal are called neurotypical brains. The mountains have helped me to truly become who I am as a neuro-deviant.”

However, that wasn’t the only huge challenge she had to overcome.

In 2011, she suffered a seriously broken leg while skiing deep powder at the Back Bowls in Vail. She hit a fallen tree covered in snow, tearing the head of her femur and suffering a spiral fracture. Muscles were torn from the bone and she bled internally. After emergency surgery, she woke up with a 14-inch titanium rod in her leg. Doctors told him she was lucky to be alive, but said she would have to walk with a cane for the rest of her life.

“I thought, ‘No, that’s not my life. The work starts today,” she said.

If only it were that simple. There were major complications. She did not heal as the doctors expected. A year and a half passed and she was still in excruciating pain. Then one day her physical therapist thought, what if she was allergic to titanium? Doctors scoffed at the idea, but Buchanan demanded they remove it anyway.

“Some people think of neurodivergence as a lack of skills,” says Shannon Foley Henn, a friend of 20 years. “I think that allowed her to be so in tune with herself and advocate for herself so much. That gave her the strength to tell her doctors, against their will, to remove the rod from her leg.”

She had completed technical school with dyslexia and ADHD. She had worked for defense contractors including 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, ‘Nobody’s going to tell me I can’t go further than this,’” Foley Henn said. “That was a lesson she had learned her whole life, and she brought it to that injury. Once she recovered from that injury, she applied it to mountain climbing. If they hadn’t removed that rod, there’s no way she would have finished all the Seven Summits.”

The Seven Summits were first completed in 1985 by Dick Bass, a Texas businessman and mountain climber who helped found Vail as one of the original investors. Later that year, Boulder’s Gerry Roach became the second to do it.

Buchanan’s intuition about that titanium rod was correct, and she thrived after it was removed. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa. She hiked to Everest base camp. She decided to climb Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest mountain in South America.