Jewel Cave National Monument Scrapbook Layout

Our first day in Custer State Park we actually left the park to run over to Jewel Cave National Monument for the morning. We wanted to arrive early to secure a guided tour - tickets tend to sell out fast during the peak season. Oddly, our biggest challenge of the day would be road construction on the on way to the park, but we still got an early tour even with the delay.

After getting our tour tickets, we had about an hour to walk through the Visitor Center, so we got our map and passport stamps, and picked up a few souvenirs - again, for me a postcard was a must-have for the scrapbook! And my son started working on his Junior Ranger booklet until it was time to go. 

The tour of Jewel Cave was amazing and completely different from Wind Cave that we had seen the day before. Jewel Cave is huge and spacious and has all of the typical cave rock formations you expect to see. We again stuck close to the ranger at the front, and the boys got to help her lead the group and lead the way when she stayed back. They loved it.

I made 4 2-page layouts for Jewel Cave, and encorporated the postcard, map, passport stamps, and my son's badge into the pages. Taking photos in this cave was also challenging, but since it is so much larger than Wind Cave the photos came out somewhat better since there was a bit more ambient light.

The paper collection that I'm using for this album had these wonderful jewel/gemstone papers that I immediately wanted to use for the cave layouts. I used them elsewhere in the album, but they seemed to fit the best here.

After the cave tour we took a short hike through a very pretty forest surrounding the visitor center.

We then headed back to Custer State Park and were finally able to start exploring the park and do some hiking there. The layouts for Custer State Park are next!