DEM patching

I am trying to cobble together 1/3 arc second DEMs from the USGS
seamless server (.adf).  I am using grass 6.4 and have spgrass6 up and
running.  when I patch the images together in grass they show up as a
three color relief map, but individually they are fine.  Is there a
way in R to make this easier or am I missing something?
thanks in advance,

Stephen Sefick

Let's not spend our time and resources thinking about things that are
so little or so large that all they really do for us is puff us up and
make us feel like gods.  We are mammals, and have not exhausted the
annoying little problems of being mammals.

								-K. Mullis