An Afternoon in the Sun at Mount Shasta

Last week (well, and this week as well) have been very gray in the valley. On Saturday afternoon, I had finally had enough, packed up my gear and drove up to Mount Shasta, where the satellite photos showed there was plenty of sun above the Tule fog that filled the Sacramento Valley.

Coming over Black Butte Summit I saw a bank of clouds forming around the base of the mountain, and worried that the long drive might have been in vain, but once I got past Weed, to the north side of Shasta, it cleared out nicely.

Though I thought I'd have only about a half an hour of light when I got there, I managed to get several nice images of the mountain from the north before the sun went down.

Mount Shasta from a ranch on the north side of the mountain.

Panorama of Mount Shasta

Bare trees below the mountain.

Panorama of the summit of Mount Shasta (view larger on Flickr)

The last photo is a stitch of 10 images taken with a 600mm lens, and shows incredible detail. The original image is 16,400x5120 pixels!

All in all, a great - if short - day of shooting. The biggest bonus was seeing the sun!