The best-selling author of The Long Haul returns with the story of ditching his truck to seek his fortune … in hemp.
After decades as a long-haul trucker, Finn Murphy left the road and settled in Boulder County, Colorado. Before long he noticed that many of his neighbors were captivated by the prospect of vast riches in “the Hemp Space.” When hemp was legalized, after eighty years in federal exile, Colorado
became the center of a hemp growing and processing boom. Figuring he’d harvest some of that easy money, Murphy bought a thirty-six-acre farm. What could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything. …
Rocky Mountain High is the comic chronicle of a wild year as Murphy follows his Great American Dream, gradually losing his shirt but not his spirit. Pivoting away from growing hemp himself, he decides to make himself a middleman. He builds drying sheds the size of football fields. He battles with
freezing temperatures and even colder bankers. And he assembles an eclectic crew of workers, including the wry and vastly talented Manuel, the business savvy Pierce, and a scruffy army of “trimmigrants”—specialized farm laborers who roam the country pursuing (or not) their own American Dreams.
Pretty soon, Murphy is burning through his cash and skirmishing with the mercurial denizens who inhabit the Wild West of the hemp market.
Told with Murphy’s trademark wit, keen eye for character, and sharp insights intothe hardscrabble society around him, Rocky Mountain High is an inside look at the alluring world of the hemp boom and a masterful tale of one entrepreneur’s misadventures.

More than thirty years ago, Finn Murphy dropped out of college to become a trucker. Since then he’s covered hundreds of thousands of miles packing, loading, and hauling people’s belongings all over America. Murphy whisks listeners down the I-95 Powerlane, across the Florida Everglades, in and out of the truck stops of the Midwest, and through the steep grades of the Rocky Mountains. He tells funny, poignant, and haunting stories of the people he moves: a hoarder in New Hampshire; a Virginia homeowner raging when Murphy’s truck accidentally runs down a stand of trees; a widow rushing her archaeologist husband’s remains and relics to a Navajo burial ceremony in New Mexico. Brimming with personality and great characters, The Long Haul explores the appeal of manual labor and shows what happens behind the scenes when we call the movers.