Latter-day Saints in southeastern Idaho are ready to host thousands of visitors to the newly renovated Idaho Falls Idaho Temple. Following more than two years of extensive interior renovation, a public open house is scheduled to begin at the historic temple, located on the picturesque banks of the Snake River. The temple closed in March 2015 for renovations.
Kevin Call is one of the many residents who grew up in the Upper Snake River Valley. “Our family has been in the valley since the turn of the century in the early 1900s. The temple has been a prominent thing for us, not only church wise but community wise. It's been such a monument on the river, a beautiful place,” said Call.
The valley’s first Mormon settlers arrived with the railroad in 1879.
“The Idaho Falls Temple is this grand architectural statement about where the Church wanted [to] be in its next hundred years, as much as the Salt Lake Temple is a statement about where it had been for the last hundred years,” said Emily Utt, historic sites curator for the Church History Department. “We wanted this temple to still feel like it had been built in the 1940s. We didn't want this to feel like a brand-new building.”
All the mechanical and electrical systems in the temple were upgraded. “The team spent lots of time reviewing the historical data that we had on the temple,” said Mark Berry, a project manager for the Church. “The architect and the design teams went back through and picked out the type of materials that [were] prevalent back in the original temple.”