For 24 years, M. John Fayhee dwelled in the Colorado High Country, where winters are both severe and long. He teamed up with renowned nature photographer John Fielder to chronicle an adventuresome life led in a land where the air is thin and the temperatures low.

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M. John Fayhee was one of the first people to thru-hike the 850-mile Arizona Trail, which travels from the Utah border to the Mexican border. The two-month trek was difficult to two reasons. First, Arizona was experiencing severe drought — meaning water sources were even more scarce than usual. Second, there were significant sections of the trail that did not yet exist, necessitating a lot of on-the-fly route-finding.

The text is augmented by images from Arizona photographer Jerry Sieve. 

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In 1996, M. John Fayhee embarked upon a two-month journey that saw him traverse the 850 miles of the Continental Divide Trail that pass through Colorado. The undertaking was made even more challenging by the fact that only about 70 percent of the CDT through Colorado was actually existed. There was much in the way of orientational guesswork, bushwhacking, getting lost and cussing.

“Along Colorado’s Continental Divide Trail” was a Colorado Book Awards Finalist.

This book is augmented by photographs by renowned nature photographer John Fielder.

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For more than two decades, Silver City resident M. John Fayhee lived above 9,000 feet in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, a spectacular land where winters can last seven months a year and where annual snowfalls can reach the height of second-story roofs. For the first couple years of that time, he was employed by a daily newspaper that completely lacked adult supervision. As a result, Fayhee was given free rein to pen whatever he desired without fear of getting fired. He took full advantage of that opportunity and eventually opted to splice some of his least-adult-supervised articles into book form. “Up at Altitude” is an unabashed personal homage to life in one of the most spectacular and climatically harsh places in the country.

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In 1992, M. John Fayhee became one of the first people to hike the 470-mile Colorado Trail end-to-end. It was early enough in the development of the CT that large sections of the trail did not yet physically exist. Therefore, he was forced to use map and compass in those pre-GPS days to work his way through some of the most rugged territory in the Mountain Time Zone.

This book is augmented with photographs from renowned nature photographer John Fielder.

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M. John Fayhee, who attended Western New Mexico University, began his explorations of Mexico’s Barrancas del Cobre — Copper Canyon — in the early 1980s when he took a detour from a multi-month overland trip to Central America. Armed with little more than a hand-drawn map, he tentatively ventured into the depths of North America’s most-extensive canyon system, which is home to the world-famous, long-distance-running Tarahumara Indians.

Over the course of the next decade, Fayhee hiked hundreds of miles in the Barrancas. He related tales of those hikes is a book that was first published in 1989 and updated and expanded in 1994.

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