Age: 28
In it: 5 years
The local: North Conway, Eldorado Canyon
Dream trip: Six months in the Mediterranean with my boyfriend and our two dogs hitting up Kalymnos, Sardina, and Corsica
Five year goal: Finish up school and take that dream trip!
Memorable ticks: Steck-Salathe in Yosemite, Big Red at Wild River, Center Route in Eldo, The Casual Route on The Diamond
Sponsors: None

The Insider:
Having traveled through miles of misfortune, Sheyna Button looks only to the redeeming road ahead. Like the looking glass of an alpine lake, Sheyna’s surface appears calmer than her depths. A full-time student and over-worked-back-broken laborer, she approaches climbing like she approaches life: one sketchy piece at a time, always juggling between sanity and insanity, action and reaction.

Sheyna grew up in poverty on the flanks of North Conway, with a single mother and two brothers, living in tents and bathing in a freezing river. Sheyna didn’t have running water until she was thirteen years old. Life was more about providing and surviving. Her passion for the mountains, and her independence as a woman, was secondary.

On the Memorial Day before her sixteenth birthday, her older brother Deric was in a tragic car accident. It would leave his body in tact, but damage his brain beyond repair. Sheyna was about to lose the most important person in her life. He survived exactly four years following the accident, living at home, being fed through a tube in his stomach, before passing on.

Devastated, Sheyna had to regain some strength and focus, and for the first time, felt the need to expand her life. In the birth of her ambition, she moved to Salt Lake City to pursue a career in snowboarding. That dream abruptly ended. While trying to clear a 35-foot cat track, she landed so hard it broke and dislocated her T11 and T12 vertebrae. The injury resulted in a hip fusion and two titanium clamps. Sheyna learned early on in life how to bounce back and get to her feet. Though, now, it seemed literal.

After a slow recovery, Sheyna began looking up towards the mountains again. This time she sought to climb. She cut her chops the old school way, and fell in love with the traditional climbing of Cathedral Ledge, Yosemite Valley, and the splitters of Indian Creek. She finally found a little taste of lost freedom. However, Sheyna also knew from past experience that the freedom she really needed had to be in balance with planning for her future. So, with her mind and body strong again, she made the decision to buckle down and put a hold on her climbing life when she was awarded the Reisher Scholarship, and a chance for a college education.

Sheyna assures me that the road to perdition is always there, waiting, but that the side roads are sometimes better taken. She continues to teach me about life and responsibility outside of climbing — I once looked only to climbing for happiness. “The sweet ain’t as sweet without the sour”, she says. Today you might find Sheyna landscaping, cleaning houses, riding her bike to school, fixing her house, applying for grants, studying at coffee houses, driving to and from Summit County to massage, washing dishes at her parents cafe, sweating in a wood shop, or if you are really lucky, rock climbing.