Wyoming
Casper Wyoming Temple opens to media, public
The Casper Wyoming Temple is the latest new house of the Lord that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has opened for media, special-guest and public tours.
That opening began Monday, Aug. 26, with the temple’s media day, as Church leaders held a 10 a.m. news conference welcoming local media representatives before leading them on tours of the temple and then being available for interviews.
Representing the Church at the Casper temple media day were Elder Randall K. Bennett, a General Authority Seventy and president of the North America Central Area; Elder James R. Rasband, a General Authority Seventy and assistant executive director of the Temple Department; and President Camille N. Johnson, Relief Society general president. They were joined by local leaders.
Elder Quentin L. Cook of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles will dedicate Casper Wyoming Temple in a single 10 a.m. session on Sunday, Nov. 24, with the session to be broadcast to all units within the Casper temple district.
The single dedication session and Nov. 24 dedication date are updates from previous announcements of a Oct. 13 dedication and two sessions at 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. The rescheduled date now has the house of the Lord in Casper becoming the Church’s 201st dedicated and operating temple.
Coinciding with Monday’s media day, the Church released interior and exterior photographs of the temple. The images and the dedication updates were first published on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
Following Monday’s media day, invited guests will tour the temple Tuesday and Wednesday, Aug. 27-28, prior to the temple’s open house that runs from Thursday, Aug. 29, through Saturday, Sept. 14.
Serving 15,000 Latter-day Saints in nearly 50 congregations within its district, the Casper Wyoming Temple will be the state’s second dedicated and operating house of the Lord, following the Star Valley Wyoming Temple, which was dedicated in 2016. The Cody Wyoming Temple, which was announced in 2021 is in planning and design.
Monday’s media day and start of the open-to-the-public period of the Casper temple is the fourth in 15 days, with similar events having happened for the Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Temple on Aug. 12 and the Mendoza Argentina and Salvador Brazil temples last week on Aug. 19. A fifth temple — the San Pedro Sula Honduras Temple — will have its media day in two weeks, on Sept. 9.
Casper temple background
Church President Russell M. Nelson announced a house of the Lord for Casper, Wyoming, during the April 2021 general conference, one of the 20 new temple locations he identified.
The temple site was released in June 2021, with plans calling for a single-story edifice of approximately 10,000 square feet. The temple grounds are a 9.5-acre parcel at the intersection of Wyoming Boulevard and Eagle Drive in Casper.
An exterior rendering of the temple was released on Sept. 9, 2021, along the announcement of the groundbreaking date.
Elder S. Gifford Nielsen, a General Authority Seventy who was then president of the Church’s North America Central Area, presided at the Oct. 9, 2021, groundbreaking.
Casper temple design and features
The Casper temple features a steel-framed modular structure, built similar to the modular construction first used by the Church with its Helena Montana Temple, which was dedicated in June 2023. The exterior is a cladding of glass-fiber reinforced concrete.
Landscaping of the 9.5-acre temple grounds includes large boulders and stones and grasses — all reflecting the region’s rocky prairie — along with native plants, multi-trunk trees and evergreens.
The design motifs through the interior are based on the stylized versions of the Indian paintbrush — Wyoming’s state flower — and the sagebrush, both native to Casper and the surrounding area.
Floor coverings include green carpet tile in the instruction room, cream wool area rugs in the celestial and sealing rooms and red, green and tan decorative rugs in the entry and waiting area. Porcelain in the Timeless Marfil color is used in the interior, with granite in the color of Coast Green in the baptistry.
Art-glass windows and interior decorative painting feature local flora — including the Indian paintbrush — and geometric Native American patterns. The doors are stained sapele and painted poplar, with millwork employing the same woods.
The Church in the Casper area
In the latter half of the 1800s, those migrating to the western United States usually traveled through Wyoming. That includes the tens of thousands of Latter-day Saint pioneers between 1847 and 1859 alone what crossed the Oregon Trail through what is now Casper in the central part of the present-day state of Wyoming en route to Fort Bridger before dropping off the trail and heading southwest toward the Salt Lake Valley. Early Church members operated ferries in the Casper area to help pioneers cross the North Platte River.
Martin’s Cove — the location where early and severe winter storms trapped the Willie and Martin handcart companies of pioneers in 1856 — is about 60 miles southwest of Casper.
The Church’s first branch was organized as part of the Western States mission in December 1920, with Latter-day Saints meeting in homes and rented buildings until the first chapel was built in 1939.
Two stakes in the region were created on Oct. 14, 1962, by Elder Spencer W. Kimball and Elder Howard W. Hunter — two members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles who later became presidents of the Church. The Wind River Stake included congregations in Lander and Riverton and the Casper Stake included those in the namesake city; the stakes are now known as the Riverton Wyoming and Casper Wyoming stakes.
Beginning in the late 1800s, the closest operating houses of the Lord for Latter-day Saints in the Casper area initially were the Logan Utah and Salt Lake temples, with members traveling in later decades to the Idaho Falls Idaho and Ogden Utah temples. Currently, the two stakes based in Casper and the one in Riverton are assigned to the Fort Collins Colorado Temple district, which is a three-hour drive from Casper, some 225 miles away.
Casper Wyoming Temple
Location: 3011 Independence Court, Casper, Wyoming 82604
Announced: April 4, 2021, by President Russell M. Nelson, President of the Church
Groundbreaking: Oct. 9, 2021, presided over by Elder S. Gifford Nielsen, a General Authority Seventy and then president of the North America Central Area
To be dedicated: Nov. 24, 2024, by Elder Quentin L. Cook of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
Property size: 9.52 acres
Building size: 9,950 square feet
Building height: 97 feet, 6 inches, including the spire
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25025988/merlin_3002642.jpg "Orem temple dedicatory prayer: Elder Christofferson notes the nobility, sacrifices of past generations")
Carl McDaniel, 65, from Washington state suffered broken bones after he was charged by a 2,000lb (900kg) bull during a visit to Yellowstone with his grandson on Friday. The encounter was recorded by Mike MacLeod, a professional photographer, who said the animal was ‘agitated, pissed off and charging anything and everything’
Wyoming
Wyoming authorities call on Rocky Mountain Power to explain role in massive November power outage
by Dustin Bleizeffer, WyoFile
The massive, multiple-utility power outage last fall that left some 250,000 customers across parts of Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana without electricity was the result of miscommunication and inadequate procedures during planned maintenance that required de-energizing a power line in southcentral Wyoming, according to a report.
The Nov. 13 incident left thousands of homes and businesses without power for 9.5 hours — longer, in some cases — and knocked out a coal-powered generator outside Glenrock. The unit at the Dave Johnston Power Plant remains offline, leaving Rocky Mountain Power to backfill some 300 megawatts of electricity — enough to power about 225,000 homes.
Without expressly assigning blame to any one party, the report — conducted by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation — indicates a series of communication breakdowns between PacifiCorp (parent company of Rocky Mountain Power), the Western Area Power Administration and, to some degree, electrical grid coordinating teams.
While it’s unclear whether authorities such as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation might pinpoint fault and assess penalties, the Wyoming Public Service Commission has called on Rocky Mountain Power to appear at a hearing scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Wednesday. The commission wants to hear from the utility about “the specifics and details of the event and report,” a public notice announced, and it “may consider and take any action that is in the public interest.”
The hearing at the Public Service Commission’s office located at 2515 Warren Avenue, Suite 300, in Cheyenne, will also be livestreamed at this link.
What happened
According to the 49-page report published in June, PacifiCorp and the Western Area Power Administration were coordinating maintenance on their respective systems that, together, required temporarily de-energizing PacifiCorp’s Aeolus–Clover 500 kilovolt line, which runs east-west and is anchored, in part, by a substation near Medicine Bow.
The effort also required curtailing some local wind energy from feeding the grid, according to the report. But on the day of the planned maintenance, Nov. 13, there was confusion about whether the Western Area Power Administration would scrap its work, so wind energy wasn’t curtailed as originally planned.
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Wind turbines near Cheyenne poke into a colorful sunrise in January 2025. (Tennessee Watson/WyoFile)
The report indicates that modeling tools might have failed to accurately measure local grid conditions, so when the power line was de-energized, “power flow rapidly redistributed throughout the northeast portion” of the local grid. “Within six seconds,” according to the report, “an electrical island formed and collapsed, causing widespread effects across that portion of the interconnection.
“The disturbance,” the report continues, “culminated in the loss of more than 4,800 [megawatts] of generation from coal, natural gas, photovoltaic and wind resources.”
The cascading power failure began at about 12:45 p.m. on a Thursday, dragging down portions of service territories operated by Rocky Mountain Power, Black Hills Energy, Montana-Dakota Utilities and some rural electric co-ops.
The report points to failures in communication, process deficiencies and inadequate modeling tools. Wind energy was not “identified as a contributing factor,” according to the report. It credits both battery storage and wind energy throughout the impacted area for supporting “a faster frequency recovery across the interconnection” and for providing “readily available capacity during system restoration.”
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
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