Temple Trip--Snowflake

Snowflake Temple

Snowflake Temple

Snowflake Temple

Snowflake Temple

Salt River Gorge

Salt River highway crossing

With Brother and Sister B and their temple map

The second half of the drive from Gila Valley to Snowflake was some of the more interesting terrain we traveled through on our trip.  For the first half we back-tracked up to Globe which was very dry uninviting desert.  But we began to gain more elevation and entered a juniper-pinion pine forest like we see on the road to Eureka.  Then suddenly we came to a river canyon, the Salt River.  It had dramatic cliffs and views as we descended to the river then climbed out on the other side.  Someone said that this river canyon would be world famous for sight-seers if not for there being an even bigger canyon up north.  I added a couple of pictures from the web to remember this canyon.

Out of the Salt River canyon we kept climbing to a ridge that was about 8000 feet above sea level.  This was the Mogollon (pronounced Muggy-yown, people said) Rim.  This is an escarpment that runs 200 miles eastward from mid AZ to near the NM border.  It forms the southern boundary of the Colorado Plateau which covers the NE fourth of AZ.  On the high slopes of the ridge we went through a Ponderosa Pine forest that reminded me of how the east slope of the Cascades in Washington state where I was raised.  We gradually descended to about 6000 feet at Show Low and the country was a high flat prairie with high desert vegetation reminiscent of some of the valleys in southern Utah. 

I could relate to this from my reading Louis L’Amour novels that many of them (for example, some of the Sackett family stories) were set in the area along the Mogollon Rim.  And I learned that he had a tyhing about this area and even built himself a cabin along the Rim, near a town named Payson, AZ.  The cabin has been preserved and is a tourist attraction.

Snowflake, about 10 miles north of Show Low was out on this high, flat terrain, and was another of the Mormon settlements in Utah.    It was founded in 1878 by leaders Erastus Snow and William Jordan Flake, hence the combined name.  The temple was dedicated in 2002 and has 11 (soon to be 12 it was announced the Sunday we were there) stakes in its district, with most of them within a 30 miles radius, so the immediate area appears to have a predominantly LDS population.  We saw at least half a dozen LDS chapels in the little twin towns of Snowflake and Taylor (total population about 10,000, with at least 2/3rds LDS).

The temple was at the top of a knoll visible to the country around it.  It had a water feature in front with water tumbling over some rocks.  It was attractively decorated.  It had the basic small temple design with a single 2-stage endowment room arrangement and no chapel.  One difference however was that the entrance was on a lower level which included the baptistry, with a stair case leading up to then main ordinance level.

While attending the temple Saturday late afternoon, we got acquainted with a couple (the B family) who invited us to attend church in their ward the next morning and to have dinner with them after.  They were interesting people.  He had recently been released as their ward Bishop and had just joined her a temple worker.  They met at BYU where she was a roommate to Sister N who lives in a neighbor ward here in Spanish Fork and who Wendy knows as a temple worker.  He has an engineering degree and is still active professionally working from home.  They are one of the few couples I have known who still have the goal of visiting every Temple in the church.  They may be falling behind, but they have two big maps (World and North America) with pins stuck in all the places of temples they have attended.   The total right now is 92.  Recently they were in Peru, and were frustrated because they found the temple closed and couldn’t check that temple off.  His father, Wilfrid B, was an anthropologist, who had taught at places like the University of Georgia and was faithful LDS.  He said that his dad was well-acquainted with John Sorenson and believed that he had consulted with Bro. Sorenson on some of the latter’s papers on Book of Mormon geography and culture.