The mountains of sand rise and fall like waves frozen in time. When I made this photograph, the lighting was perfect. The afternoon sun cast soft shadows giving the scene an unreal quality — almost like an illustration or painting. But the scene is real. Two small figures, easy to overlook at first, show just how vast these dunes are. I named this piece “Wave over Wave” because the dunes, rising and falling, remind me of ocean waves frozen in time. I’m not the first to notice this similarity. When the famous explorer Zebulon Pike first saw these dunes, he observed that “their appearance was exactly that of the sea in a storm, except as to color…” Although he was far from this first to visit these dunes — humans first visited this land at least 11,000 years prior — these words appear to be the first ever written down describing this ocean of sand.