Absolutely!
Even where I'm at, at 5200 feet, I have to go to fairly extensive lengths to get good reliable burning of pellets in my
AMNPS. Most of the folks on this forum are at much lower elevations, and it does make a big difference.
Drying the pellets is a huge deal. I have to get mine very dry. I cook them in a convection oven for half an hour to an hour at 250F or so. Then I put them into mason jars while they're still fairly hot and seal them up until I'm ready to use them. Plastic bags are no good because while a typical bag stops liquid water, it won't stop water vapor. You can smell an onion right through a baggie, and those are larger molecules than water vapor.
Mason jars are cheap and reusable. Make sure to keep sawdust off of the sealing surfaces by wiping the rim of the jar before attaching the lid each time and they seal up very well.
I have not tried grinding the pellets into dust, but some folks have had good luck with that method.
I have modified my MES-40 quite a bit to get good airflow, and I have baffles that direct the airflow right at/over the
AMNPS. I'm not using a mailbox mod - yet.
Many people claim that at my elevation, the
AMNPS (maze) will not work at all and I need to use one of the tube type smoke generators with dust. However, I've gotten it to work by making sure the pellets are very dry and making sure that they receive a LOT of air.
I also pre-heat my smoker so that when I put the maze full of pellets in, the smoker is already hot, and will "draw" well.
I have about a ten inch section of stovepipe that I jam into the top vent opening to get extra draw.
I light the pellets on fire with a Mapp Gas torch, and allow them to burn with a flame with the door of the smoker open for 10 minutes or so. Then I blow them out and then hold a small computer fan so it's blowing right on the cherry, making it really glow hot. After a while, the thing will burst into open flame on its own as soon as I take the fan away from it. I let it burn for a bit longer, and then blow it out. At that point, it's very hard to blow out. It keeps re-lighting like one of those joke birthday cake candles, but eventually it settles down and will just smolder.
Then, and only then, do I close the door of the smoker. But I have the pellet hopper/dumper thing completely removed. And I have the "guts" of the whole original chip burner taken out of the smoker. I have some bent aluminum to direct the air that comes into the chip hopper hole right at where I put the pellet tray. The tray is up off of the floor of the smoker because it's resting on a pair of metal rods in the lower left of this particular smoker.
So: Very dry pellets.
Lots of airflow - helped by making sure the smoker is hot and the "chimney" is in place to increase the draft through the whole works.
Never any water pan, and certainly no water.
I think you probably will need more airflow than what people are recommending because of your very high elevation.
For cold smoking, I use that same small computer fan, to which I've attached four strong magnets at the corners, stuck over the hopper hole (which is the air intake for my setup) blowing fresh air into the smoker, of course. I adjust its position to get the airflow I want. If it's directly over the opening, then I get max airflow. Slide it off to the side so more or less of the fan is over the hole, and I can get less as needed.
I can imagine possibly needing to use a fan to force air through a mailbox for cold smoking at high elevation because there would be no natural draft up through the smoker with it being cold.
High elevation presents some challenges, but it's really pretty basic. You just need to get enough oxygen to the pellets to achieve that "just right" rate of burning. And that means you have to play with it for your particular elevation, humidity, temperature, etc.
I've got to try grinding some pellets into dust sometime. That seems like a great idea, and I've never tried it.
