Candy Cane Mountains

Hills banded red and white, striped by iron in the clay rather than by anything human.

The stripes are iron oxide in the sedimentary clay, laid down over a very long time and then tilted, so what you see is a cross section of geology standing on its side. Nobody painted them and nobody is maintaining them.

They sit beside the road north out of Baku toward Quba, close enough that most people see them from a car window and keep going. Stop. The scale only registers when you are standing at the bottom of one.