Butterfield was a founder member of the John Muir Trust, set up in 1983, and by the time it purchased the mountain Schiehallion in 1998 he was a trustee and gave the royalties of his 1999 book The Magic of the Munros towards the cost. He followed this in 2000 with The Call of the Corbetts (a Corbett is a mountain over ) and both books became best-sellers. He was a co-founder and first president of the Munro Society and was a part of the successful campaign to extend the Cairngorms National Park further into Perthshire. He became a director of the John Muir Trust and was the fourth person to be given its Lifetime Achievement Award, after Tom Weir, Adam Watson and Doug Scott.