Mountain Top at Snowbird

Went to a business training seminar at Snowbird Lodge in Utah this past week. After watching the sunset and weather patterns for 3 days, I decided take the last tram up to the 11,000 ft peak on my last night there, to try and capture the amazing light that would hit right at sunset. I had a few things going against me: no tripod, no graduated ND filters, and that last tram would be heading back down FOUR minutes before the sun would hit the horizon, which was the shot I had hoped to get, but at least I ended up with this scene.

To get the shot, I auto-bracketed and took three handheld shots as steady as I could, all at f/8, ISO 640, with my 16-35mm Canon lens set at about 25mm on my 5D2. The three images were too bright at first, so I had to roll the three-image "bracket set" down all the way EV-wise to get one image where the sky wasn't blown out. I couldn't manually adjust shutter speed like I do on a tripod because the composition would have been too far off to get a good HDR merge in Photomatix, so I went with a modified auto-bracket so the three shots would fire quickly (while I held my breath, lol).

After Photomatix, I boosted contrast so I could eliminate that swashy HDR look, and actually had to CUT saturation on Yellows due to the mountain mist being so well backlit. It's actually still a little strong IMO. The last step was to select the highlights onto a new layer (neat trick: CTRL Click the RGB composite Channel, then Copy & Paste) and use a 30.0 Gaussian blur just on that layer to create a sort of Orton effect on the trees. You do have to fade the layer way back of course. And so, that's ONE way to capture a sunset in the mountains when you don't have the gear you need...

I wouldn't normally plant the sun dead center, but given the way the mountain ridges all point there I'm thinking it works. But I'd appreciate a different set of eyes on this scene, let me know if it does anything for you, or if it's just a bit cliche. I included a larger version too, PLEASE view that, the initial image is pretty blah.

Thanks!

[Edited to fix really bad grammar, and clarify some image specs]