Georgia O'Keeffe repeatedly painted Cerro Pedernal and chose it as the place for her ashes.
Cerro Pedernal is a flat-topped mountain in northern New Mexico, near the landscapes where O'Keeffe lived and worked. Its distinctive profile appears in several of her paintings, sometimes transformed into a simplified horizontal form rather than rendered as a topographically exact view.
O'Keeffe once described the mountain as her private mountain because it was visible from her home and became a recurring personal subject. After her death in 1986, her ashes were scattered from its summit. The mountain is therefore connected both to her visual imagery and to the final disposition of her remains.