It’s very rewarding to spend time in the beautiful outdoors. The scenic views, the adrenaline rush of hiking to the summit and the laughter around a crackling campfire. These are the memories that can stick with us, but often, not as long as we want them to.
Life moves quickly and these vivid memories are bound to fade with time. That’s why it is important to preserve them – not just for nostalgia but also to share and relive them with our loved ones. In today’s post, we will touch on ways to preserve memories in print, from creating a photo album and making a nature journal to creating a custom adventure calendar and photo-based gifts.
Creative Ways to Preserve Your Outdoor Memories
Photo Album
One of the best ways to preserve your outdoor memories is by creating your own photo album. Photo albums essentially turn your scattered digital photos into a single cohesive story. To make things even better, they are very easy to create using an online tool. You can even find drag-and-drop platforms that make the creation very straightforward.
Flipping through physical pages often feels more meaningful than scrolling through a phone gallery. And a photo album offers exactly that.
Nature Journal
Another creative way to preserve your memories is to make a nature journal. A nature journal is essentially a mix of a diary, sketchbook and scrapbook – only that yours will be tailored to outdoor journaling.
Same as a photo album, this is pretty easy to make. You will need your printed mini-photos and maybe some dried leaves/flowers.
Choose a page, stick the printed photos alongside the dried vegetation and add a few notes about each location and how it felt exploring it. You don’t need to be an absolute artist with it. Just make it intentional and personal.
Custom Adventure Calendar
A custom adventure calendar is another creative way to preserve and turn your best trail memories into beautiful and useful year-round pieces. So, how do you do it?
The easiest way will be to pick your 12 favourite outdoor photos – one for each month. But where is the fun in that? Try combining several pictures from your trip into a collage for each page of the month. Also, add captions or meaningful dates (like birthday hike or anniversary camping).
Using these pictures for your anniversary calendar helps keep memories alive and visible throughout the year. Additionally, they are a thoughtful gift for your travel companions.
Photo-Based Gifts
Last but not least, you can turn these memories into gifts for birthdays, anniversaries and other special occasions. A good example of such is printing the adventure photos on a mug, keychain, notebook or a tote bag. It is a perfect way to gift your friends who joined the trip or a loved one as a personal keepsake.
The great thing about such a gift is how thoughtful and unique it is. It allows you to take something stock and turn it into a personalised item, perfect for gifting. In addition, it transforms memories into everyday objects, keeping the outdoors close even when you are indoors.
Conclusion
Most of us have spent some time outdoors. And the memories we create are just too beautiful to live in the cloud or get stuck in our phone’s galleries. Besides keeping them a little far from our eyes, storing the pictures in digital format increases the risk of losing them (through accidental deletion or device loss). So, why not preserve them by creating a photo album, incorporating them in a nature journal, adventure calendar or a photo-based gift?
