Trail-blend help

Well, this was taken when Mark, Erik and myself went up to Mt St Helens and camped overnight this last fall. While walking on the trail, I just stopped to feel the cool, refreshing mountain air whisk by (helping to dry my sweaty, out of breath body. I liked the path with all it's diversity, and the surrounding view. It had quite a bit of range to it, so I lazily slapped together a gradient blend. I'm not sure I have the strength to really fix it the way it needs to be fixed, and I know the blend is super apparent.
Does anybody have a quick fix suggestion for me on what they would do to fix this (other than hit the delete key )
Thanks for your thoughts...

There’s always mermaids

Dont tempt me, Jim!

Just lighten up the gradient blend a bit. Right now the right diagonal is much darker. Even it out and IMO you will have a winner.

If you just want to spend some quality time with PS then that's up to you, otherwise, the delete key would be the real quick fix.

I'll check it out when the link un-breaks again...

Just a little wide-scale dodge/burn and then some fine tuning with smaller brushes seemes to do the job well. Depending on the durability of the original RAW file, just a little noise clean-up may or may not be necessary before printing. I don't believe it would be too noisy or that the adjustments would damage the image much if it were a file from my 5D.

Hmmm...I'm suprised at how well the d/b did on the jpeg from whatI can tell. In lab color and the raw file, I bet it would work even better (I did this one before I started working in LAB). That's enough of a change to make the blend fairly transparent. Thanks Marc...

Ya know, Rick, now that I look at this on my good monitor here at home, I see that it ain't half bad, although, Ellen really makes it now.