It’s very exciting times for those of us who live in northern Colorado: the Church announced at General Conference in April that a new temple would be built in Fort Collins. Today, the Church announced the location of that temple.
The site is currently a field on the corner of two large streets in the southeastern part of Fort Collins. It is across the street from a larger-than-normal chapel that many people think will eventually become a stake center of a new stake. The site is inside the boundaries of the Loveland stake, to which I belong.
The new site is about five minutes off of I-25. I would guess that the new temple boundaries will include southern Wyoming (the Laramie and Cheyenne areas), as well as stakes in northern Colorado, including Loveland, Fort Collins, Greeley, Longmont and probably Boulder and all the way down to Thornton and the southeastern parts of Boulder county. I’d also be willing to bet that the northeastern parts of Colorado (Sterling and Fort Morgan) will be served by the new temple and also northwestern Kansas and western Nebraska. The new location is very central for many of these people, and the drive for people in Laramie, Wyoming, for example, will be an hour, compared to more than two hours to the Denver temple today.
At stake conference we were told the size of the temple would be in the range of a “mid-size temple,” meaning about 10,000 to 11,000 square feet. This probably means two or three endowment rooms and no cafeteria.
The field where the temple will be built is in a mostly residential area just 15 minutes from the Loveland-Fort Collins airport. It is pretty far from downtown Fort Collins, where Colorado State University is located.
Anyway, my wife and I are really excited. Most people do not anticipate a lot of opposition to the new temple, but you never know. The stake president asked us at stake conference to pray for quick approval of the new temple, and we have been doing that as a family.