Early morning light lights up the Sierra crest.
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This is a very intriguing image. While the light and clouds are interesting, it’s the small dark purple hills at the base of the big mountain that sets this image apart for me. Those hills are pretty small in the frame, but they carry an out-sized visual weight in the image, and play a very important role in helping the shot avoid being too static looking. The processing looks great, I like the way the alpenglow looks. My only nit is that I wish there was slightly more empty space at the bottom. Not a lot, just a sliver more.
These are least most interesting clouds from your recent series. That says more about the clouds in your other shots than it does about these clouds, which are fine on a standalone basis. Overall though this is another great shot in your cloud-scape series, with the landscape playing a larger role here.
The alpenglow is just simply gorgeous, Harley. But for whatever reason, I am a little skeptical about the “blank sky” on the upper right corner. I like the small hills for the same reasons that @Ed_McGuirk has mentioned but the upper right corner keeps pulling my eyes there.
Harley, I, like @Ed_McGuirk, think that the dark purple low mountains make the image truly interesting. The texture in the big mountains is great as is the light, but those low mountains create depth and a 3D look - great shot. I cropped the image per @Adhika_Lie’s suggestion.
Gorgeous image Harley! Like the others, I find myself wishing for more real estate in the bottom. I stretched out the bottom (increasing canvas size/rectangular selection of just the bottom brown/create new layer with the selection/Edit/Scale/stretch down, then crop away the unused canvas). Makes me wish I was there.
Harley,
You must have had these gorgeous cloud laden skies every day on your desert excursion as this is another beauty. The light on the ridgeline is exquisite and the purple toned hills make for the perfect setup for the BG peaks IMO. My couple of suggestions were addressed perfectly with @Larry_Greenbaum and @Tony_Siciliano’s reposts. You had to have been happy with all the keepers you came away with from this trip.
Thanks for the comments and suggestions, @Adhika_Lie, @Ed_McGuirk, @Larry_Greenbaum, @Tony_Siciliano and @Ed_Lowe.
Tony, I played with the stretch and at least the way I was doing it, I found the stretched area got soft really fast. Do you find that happens when you do it? I tried it with a couple images just for fun and saw the same thing happen with both? I had more luck with the old fashioned add canvas and clone in the area.
Harley, you caught some fine light here and your modest panorama crop adds a good sense of a wide vista. Those dark hills at the bottom are a neat extra that strike me as slightly whimsical.
Harley, I don’t use this technique much, but I’m not suprised. I’ve usually used it for skies, where there is little detail to get “soft”. Obviously, a bigger number of pixels to be stretched into a smaller area would be better.
Gorgeous morning light on the sierras here, Harley. I like it as posted originally, and I’ll be odd person out with maybe a slight crop from the left side if anything. But the posted image gets my… 
Beautiful, Harley. A little slice of heaven. Hope to walk over that crest next month. Your processing looks spot-on to me. As far as the crop, scrolling back and forth, I think I like a slice taken off the top, similar to Larry’s take. I would also add a bit on the bottom, maybe not as much as Tony’s version but just enough that with the crop up top you move the image away from 50/50. I just looks more dynamic at ~1/3 sky to me. As far as how to add a strip at the bottom - I’m no Photoshop guru but I would add some canvas and use content aware fill rather than doing any stretching. The bottom is pretty dark and featureless so this should be easy to do.
I love it! I hiked the JMT a couple of years ago, but didn’t capture anything as good as this!
Good work,
Tim