Death Valley’s Black Mountains loom over the lonely cemetery at nearby Tecopa. I structured this landscape as a seven-layer image. The base layer holds the burying ground, with its stark white crosses, a small vase of flowers, and an incongruous empty beer bottle. The cemetery fades into a transitional layer of desert grasses, which in turn gives way to a layer of trees and farmland. The Tecopa wetlands make up the fourth layer, which move us back into the huge valley at the base of the mountains. The mountains lift us up towards the sky in the sixth layer, while the white cloudscape in the final layer echoes the white in the crosses below.