By Brandon Hill on February 8, 2020 • ( Leave a comment )

2018: Salton Sea Road Trip – Salvation Mountain

Our next stop on our Salton Sea road trip was at Salvation Mountain. As a kid I loved National Geographic and I remember an article about the mountain. Aaron Huey, of National Geographic shared that “Salvation Mountain is a literal man-made mountain 28 years in the making, covered in half a million gallons of latex paint. What started as a small monument made of dirt and painted cement became, over time, a sprawling adobe and hay-bale mountain complex.” I encourage you to follow the link to read more about this unique location.

This is one of the most bizarre places that I have ever been – but it was worth seeing it. I was surprised to see that there were many foreign tourists at this location and my though was “I hope that they don’t think all of the United States is like this!”. We took some pictures and then took turns climbing to the top so that we could take pictures of each other from the bottom and top.

For this spread I used a bunch of left of scraps of paper and my Cricut machine, to cut out the mountain shape (which is the same design I used in Europe Vacation 2015: Jungfraujoch. It shows how using different color papers in your cuts has a tremendous difference in the final product. I used a 12×24 mat and carefully lined up the 12×12 papers so that the cuts would match the division of the page. I also added the red heart to the layout to match the heart on the mountain. I placed the whole maintain cutout on cloud background paper to match the sky in the pictures. I placed the photos without borders onto the page on purpose – when I tried borders it made the pictures stand out more – and for this spread I did not want that – I wanted it to be hard to look at so that you really had to focus to see what was going on – because that was the experience of the mountain itself – very hard to take in as a whole – you had to look at small pieces at a time.

I affixed the brochure to the outside of the plastic page protector so that the viewer could open it to read about the history of the location.