On a recent cross-country ski trip with my wife in the 100-Mile Wilderness region, I decided to lighten my load by carrying my iPhone instead of my heavy DSLR camera. Our destinations were two camps operated by the Appalachian Mountain Club – Gorman Chairback and Little Lyford. The AMC owns nearly 67,000 acres in the region as part of its Maine Woods Initiative and grooms a network of ski trails in addition to operating the lodges.

I have been using the iPhone as my sole camera on hiking trips into the mountains for a couple of years and decided to focus on using it to take panorama images during this ski trip. The iPhone’s native camera app has a decent panorama option but I prefer to use an app called AutoStitch Panorama ($1.99 on Apple’s App Store, also available for Android).

The one weakness of both apps is that if there are strong horizontal lines in your scene, the lines will appear curved in the panorama, resulting in images having a fish-eye look. For that reason, when I took a photo of icicles hanging in front of the logs of a bunkhouse at Little Lyford, I used my DSLR camera, which had been brought into camp along with most of our other gear via snowmobile by the AMC crew. Having your gear transported to the camps is part of the package deal of staying at the camps, which includes breakfast, dinner and a trail lunch.

Clouds and snow descended on us midway through day two, so I missed out on photographing many of the sweeping vistas I had hoped for, but the fresh coat of snow provided numerous other panoramic possibilities.