[/caption] 8365′ Mt. St. Helens is an amazing place to visit on a sunny winter day. However, these days can be far and in between. I was fortunate enough to be visiting during a day that offered very few clouds. Gazing up at the mountain, as seen from the south, makes it look like a giant ice cream cone with the numerous rock outcropping protruding out as though they are nuts you find in rocky road ice cream. As you ascend towards its summit you will be able to get spectacular views of Mt. Adams in the east and Mt. Hood looking south. I’ve never climbed to the summit but I would have enjoyed snow-shoeing parallel at the higher elevation even more since there are so many crags lingering along the volcano. This photo was taken at about 6000′ and if you look closely you can see all of the snow-shoe tracks lurking all over the mountain. Unfortunately, on this day I got a very late start and had already spent the good part of the late morning snow-shoeing in the lower elevations. My food and water rations were low and I was pretty well spent. To get this shot I was using my 18-55mm Canon lens and attached my warming and CIR-PL filter to help saturate the blue sky and reduce the harsh glare created by the snow. I had to set the white balance to +0.7 so the snow wouldn’t be underexposed as well as the blue sky. The focal length was at 46mm and I was able to keep the field of view high in order to eliminate any blur other than the tree in the lower part of the photo. I wasn’t using a tripod on this day since I figured that the bright sunny skies didn’t warrant the need but I wished that I had. However, I was moving so much and I was always on very uneven ground that I probably wouldn’t have used it very much. I had the camera mode in Normal/Program mode so the aperture was at F-8 and the shutter speed at 1/160 second. Because it was later in the afternoon when I took this shot, you can see some of the shadows lingering over some of the snow covered crevices in the higher elevations.