Zion National Park Scrapbook Cover Page

Last August our family took our annual National Parks vacation and this year we headed out to Utah. There are 5 national parks in Utah, as well as many other National Monuments, but the seeing "Mighty 5" was our goal: Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, and Zion. Zion has been on our short list for a while now, and it did not disappoint. It was simply gorgeous.

I had a little bit of a hard time choosing a paper collection for these photos. I had previously purchased the We R Memory Keepers High Five collection, but wasn't sure about using it on these photos. The main colors are black, white, green, and yellow, and I wasn't sure that it would work the best with these photos - the rocks of Zion have so much deep red and brown in them, and I thought maybe I should use papers that highlight that?

But I loved the collection and I thought it had a bit of a southwestern vibe mixed with a bit of nature and that it could work. I was able to coordinate a bunch of other nature and outdoors themed papers with it so that I could mix and match, and have enough to do the full album.

For this cover page, I kept things fairly simple: a big bold heading, one large scenery photo, and one photo with a little more detail. And with a tag, some washi tape and a few embellishments, the page was complete.

This was my first time using washi tape and I have to say...I love it! I used it as a border to frame out the 5x7 photo, and used it again to frame out the title.

This was a fun layout to make and came together in less than 30 minutes. I think my favorite piece is the heading with the big block letters. 

Thanks for looking!

Mountain Biking on the Glacial Drumlin Trail

The last of the 2016 mountain biking layouts was actually the first one we did last year. My son and I rode 15 miles of the Glacial Drumlin trail one morning, and I created four scrapbook layouts for it. 

The papers on these layouts are a combination of papers from the Paper Studios "Murphy's Square" collection mixed with one sheet of paper with trees on it, and one sheet with gears on it. Even though they were not a direct match to the other papers, they were a close enough match and I wanted to bring in a little bit of nature and a little bit of a biking theme into the pages.

I left the photos in chronological order to highlight the different things we saw along the way and the things we stopped to look at. Often I will shuffle the order of photos around to create the best use of space, but these all seemed to work in the order they were taken, so there wasn't too much shuffling. Here are the final 4 layouts:

Thanks for looking! For more mountain biking layouts please click here!

Mountain Biking on the Badger State Trail

The second trail we rode this year as a family was the Badger State Trail. We drove to the trailhead in Belleville, and biked the few miles to the Stewart Tunnel. Several years ago we biked this part of the trail, but enjoyed it so much we decided to go back and do it again.

It is a straight, flat trail that has just a slight uphill grade as you go south. After just a couple of miles you approach the train tunnel. 

The tunnel is dark and a little eerie! Since you can't see the other end of the tunnel when you enter, flashlights are required as is walking your bike through. After the tunnel we continued down the trail a bit, then turned around to bike back to our vehicle, once again going through the tunnel. 

For these layouts, I again used a paper collection called "Murphy's Square" by The Paper Studio. I also used this on the CamRock Trail Page, and continued to use this for additional biking pages. Although it's not necessarily biking or nature themed paper, I liked the little bit rustic look and the colors lend themselves to an outdoorsy page. I've found that biking themed scrapbook supplies can be hard to come by, and it's often just adding little details like the gears that can make it theme specific.

I accented the page with some journaling cards by We R Memory Keepers Grayson Collection, some metal gear embellishments also by The Paper Studio, and some arrows created with paper punches or cut by hand.

Here are the final 4 layouts:

Thanks so much for looking! Our next biking trail is the Glacial Drumlin Trail.

Mountain Biking on the CamRock Trail Scrapbook Page

Last year we tried to bike more as a family, and one of the trails we rode was the CamRock Trail. This trail offers a traditional flat gravel trail, but also known for it's single track trails that branch off the main trail.

The single track is a challenging trail, and we had all biked on it once before several years ago. We all did better this time around that last time, and only had to stop and walk our bikes up or down the steep hills a couple of times.

For this layout, I used a couple of earthy fall papers, since it was late October when we biked this trail. The papers are from a Paper Studio paper stack called Murphy's Square, and the wooden gears, journaling card, arrow border and wooden-look frame were added to add some little details to the page.

I didn't take a lot of photos on this trail since we were busy biking it, but had enough to do one layout. Thanks for looking! Up next is the Badger State Trail and the Stewart Tunnel.

Hiking the Ice Age Trail Scrapbook Page

Early last spring we went hiking on the Ice Age Trail and hiked a short segment called the Blackhawk Segment. We only hiked a few miles of this segment since we had to backtrack to get back to our car, but it was a fun and scenic hike none the less.

We were pretty excited to be hiking on a National Scenic Trail, and the boys enjoyed looking for the Yellow blazes that mark the trail. Along the way, I took several photos of signs and markers on the trail, in addition to scenery shots and photos of the kids exploring the trail.

For these layouts, I used a collection of supplies called Outdoor Trail by Kaisercraft. I had originally purchased this in hopes of using it for one of our National Parks trips, but I ended up not using it for those and thought it would be perfect for these photos instead.

Since it was so early in the year, the photos are quite neutral a with a  lot of grey, tan and brown...there is not a lot of color. To add some color to the layouts, I accented with green and orange - using green background paper and accenting with orange where I could. Even with the little bits of color, the layouts are still pretty neutral and earthy.

Here are the final 4 layouts:

Thanks for looking!

Harney Peak Trail Scrapbook Page

We saw a lot of great stuff in South Dakota last summer, but our best experience was hiking the Harney Peak Trail in Custer State Park. It was the most challenging hike we've ever completed as a family, and it was an amazing experience. I loved Harney Peak so much I made 11 2-page layouts for it in the scrapbook. Yes, 22 pages of just this hike. There's a lot to talk about and look at!

We made the decision the day before that we would hike Harney Peak. It was a question mark up until then, but after we easily hiked the 3 mile Sunday Gulch Trail which had a fair amount of uphill terrain, we decided we could do the 6 to 7 mile hike up the mountain. We planned to leave early the next morning, as they were calling for rain in the afternoon and we didn't want to risk getting stuck up there in a thunderstorm.

We hit the trail at 7:30am, it was a crisp and clear morning, and very quiet on the trail. Admittedly I was a little worried about this hike - how we would all feel, how strenuous it would be, and if we'd make it to the top. From the trailhead, we could not see the peak and we really didn't know where it was. So we just started hiking, and followed the signs for Trail #9.

After hiking for about 30 minutes and gradually gaining a little elevation, we rounded a bend and off in the distance we could see it. What looked like a little stone hut on the top of a mountain REALLY FAR AWAY and REALLY HIGH UP. My heart sank a little and I really started to have my doubts. But we kept hiking onward.

It was very still and quiet on the trail, we all spread out and didn't talk much. The boys trailed behind us, picking up pine cones from the Ponderosa Pines and peeling them apart - they made up some kind of game doing this and entertained themselves for quite a while.

The main section of the hike was very easy, the uphills were very gradual and you didn't really feel the elevation changing. There was always so much to look at that we just kept hiking without really noticing how high we were getting. As we started to near the peak, we could feel the terrain changing and the inclines becoming more steep. We knew we were getting closer. From here, the real hike began. A lot of uphill, and a lot of stone stairs. There were some rest areas and overlooks along the way that we pulled off into to catch our breath. It just seemed to keep going and going upward, and we still couldn't see the top or the lookout tower. 

But the higher we climbed the more excited we got - we could see for miles and knew we were getting up there, we knew it was close. We finally reached a sign for a trail that branched off that said "Harney Peak Lookout" and made our way down that trail. As we rounded a bend, we could begin to see the top of the stone tower emerge from the trees. After lots of stone steps upward, we reached the tower...we had made it! 

At the peak it was extremely windy, and there was no one else at the tower with us. We explored the tower a bit, took some photos and video, and ate some granola bars we brought along. The kids ran around and explored the tower, while I mostly took pictures and tried to capture it all on camera. We hung out at the tower for about a half hour, then decided to start making our way back down. It took us just under 2 hours to hike up, so we figured the hike down would be a little shorter. We were all a little sad to leave the peak. 

The hike down went quickly and the trail was getting much busier, we probably passed over 60 people heading up. We were the 4th group to make it up that morning, as we passed only 3 others coming down on our way up. It was great to see so many people out there hiking  - people of all ages and abilities. We practically raced down the mountain, as the kids needed to use the bathroom, and we made it back down in a little over an hour. Our full hike was 3.5 hours to cover the almost 7 miles.

I took a lot of photos on this hike and decided early on that I wasn't going to skimp on the scrapbook pages for this one - all the photos I wanted were going in! So I ended up with what might be considered an exorbitant amount of scrapbook pages for this hike, but I know we'll look back at this hike often. So here they are, all 11 layouts:

Thanks for looking! If you are ever in Custer State Park - do this hike! You won't regret it.