miden1138: It's a bit confusing, but basically what I'd recommend you do is download a free copy of the program 3dem and use it to open the zip files (which should be in sdts.tar.gz format) rather than extracting them. This will open them up and allow you to save them to a usgs dem format for import into Vue. A note, when you try to import into Vue you will have to use 3DEM to crop out an area no larger than 2048 x 2048 (I recommend slightly less due to it seeming to still get hung up on anything that's slightly over 2048 but not yet at 2049, and there is no accuracy gauge in 3dem so you'll just have to play with it till you find the crop area that comes out in Vue to be less than 2048. A couple other notes, when downloading for the 10m mt. st. helens, you'll want to download the mountain itself as well as the files of spirit lake west and east, as well as one other one that I can't remember off the top of my head that is the southeast quadrangle that lies under spirit lake east, this will give you a nice area to start cropping out sections you want that have more than just the mountain as like Rids said, there is a lot of interesting terrain around the mountain as well. War2: Yes!! It would definately be nice to see Eon improve the dem imports and lift the annoying terrain size limit restriction, let us do it and deal with the memory issues later, most of us using Vue have the system specs to be able to do it anyway (at least for the 4097 x 4097 size) JavaJones: I'll keep you posted on what progress I end up making with Vue auto aligning the dem files, I'm hoping I can just crop out chunks and bring them in with a little bit of overlap so that 1: there's no seam lines, and 2: so that I have a point of reference to rescale and adjust as needed. Rids: Oh yeah, I know, I checked out the little lake up in the hills to the north (st helens lake) as well as coldwater lake, I still want to check out the Toutle river drainage (which I need to do a new download for to get it as one thing) and the debris hummocks at the entrance to the Toutle River, Very cool stuff to see all around the volcano.