As you can tell, this was an exciting shot to take. More than just gripping the camera with big gloves, but steadying myself in 40-50mph wind gusts and flying spindrift. Exactly the type of challenge I love as a photographer. I want to take people into this brutal mountain environment as best I can with a photograph. This particular environment, was captured during a mid-winter ascent of Oregon's Iron Mountain. Just a steep little feature in the Cascade Range that took a few hours to summit in deep snow. Avys were starting to come down with all the wind slabbing, making the return trip a little more dicey than I had anticipated, but fortunately a nice ridge was available most of the way. This was my favorite image from the trip, depicting one of Iron Mountain's pinnacles (about 100m high), the remnants of an old volcanic plug.

I used a very wide lens to take it all in and a shutter fast enough to freeze the flying snow. I converted the image to B&W digitally to better handle the exposure contrasts, and added a little cool toning to best represent the conditions.