Ultra-soft Temple Sweatshirt

Location
1875 West Canyon Drive, Snowflake, Arizona, about 150 miles northeast of Phoenix. The 7.5-acre site sits on a cedar-covered bluff at the west end of town, next to a golf course, at 5,746 feet. Locals had been calling it Temple Hill before ground was ever broken.

Temple Number
The 108th dedicated temple, and the second in Arizona after Mesa.

Announced
April 2, 2000, by President Gordon B. Hinckley at general conference. Some were surprised a town of Snowflake's size was getting one.

Groundbreaking
September 23, 2000, on Temple Hill. Elder Rex D. Pinegar of the Seventy presided. President Hinckley had chosen the site himself.

Dedicated
March 3, 2002, by President Gordon B. Hinckley, in four sessions. Elder Neal A. Maxwell of the Quorum of the Twelve and Elder Dale E. Miller of the Seventy also spoke, and more than 11,000 people attended at the temple or at three nearby sites.

Architecture
Designed by Trest Polina of Fanning Bard Tatum Architects in Albuquerque and built by Okland Construction of Tempe. Two tones of polished granite quarried in China. Two stories and 18,621 square feet, partly set into the hillside, rising 60 feet to a single attached spire with a gold-leafed angel Moroni.

Ordinance Rooms
Two instruction rooms, two sealing rooms, one baptistry.

First Temple President
Leon T. Ballard, a Snowflake native, with his wife, Flora, as matron.

• The open house in February 2002 drew 94,146 visitors in two weeks. Snowflake and neighboring Taylor had fewer than 9,000 residents between them.
• About eight feet came off the top of the knoll to seat the two-level building, and the lower floor sits partly inside the hill.
• Primary children wrote their names on rocks that went into the foundation. Youth hung the crystals on the chandeliers, and adults baked more than 100,000 cookies for open house visitors.
• The groundbreaking closed with a prayer in Navajo, offered by Tuba City stake president Frank Gilmore in his native language. The building was finished about 17 months later.

• The interior mixes the two cultures of the region. Pioneer quilt-block patterns and Native American tribal designs run through the carpet sculpting and the ceiling stencils.
• Linda Turley-Christensen, a Native American artist, painted a mural across three walls of an ordinance room, moving from red sandstone cliffs to pine-covered mountains.
• Hopi artisan Gary Polacca, president of the Polacca Branch, made one of the pots on display. Local Native American artists also supplied rugs and woven baskets.
• A stained-glass window of the Savior with children came from a house of worship on the East Coast. It turned up at a Boston auction house and is now mounted as a lighted panel.
• A reproduction of a John Jarvis painting shows the missionary Jacob Hamblin meeting Hopi Chief Tuba, one of the earliest Native American converts.

• The angel Moroni statue was replaced in March 2017. The original faced east, over the back of the building. Its replacement was set facing west, over the entrance.

• The town name is two surnames. Settlers arrived in 1878 on land William J. Flake bought from a rancher, and when Flake asked Apostle Erastus Snow what to call the place, Snow offered "Snow Flake."
• Settlers' journals record Church leaders talking about a temple in the area as early as 1880, about two years after the first families arrived.
• At dedication the district covered 11 stakes in northeastern Arizona and a sliver of western New Mexico, including members on the Apache, Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni reservations.
• Lorum Stratton, 91 and the oldest Snowflake native, told the Church News: "I didn't think I'd get to see it in my day."