It’s easily possible to get lost in the folds of the earth viewed from Zabriskie Point: visually with a camera, and practically as well if one wanders in the valleys. The “social trail”—an informal path created by erosion due to foot traffic, and generally deprecated by the National Park Service—shown in Lost in the Hills helps add a sense of scale to the scene.

Without a human-size reference point, the landscape can become abstract and context-less: it could be big, it could be small (if rotated, the couch shown in this story could be an immense landscape after all, among other things), and who really knows for sure?