After 130 Years, an LDS temple comes to the Big Horn Basin

For generations of Big Horn Basin Latter-day Saints, temple worship required traveling hundreds of miles. Now, more than a century of waiting, traveling and praying has finally brought a temple here.

Nearly five years after members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints first heard church President Russell M. Nelson announce plans for a temple in Cody, the building is nearly ready to begin the work for which it was constructed: serving as a place of worship, peace and, for church members, a place for sacred ordinances intended to bind families together across generations.

For a town the size of Cody, the temple is hard to miss.

Its nearly 101-foot steeple rises above the western edge of town, while carefully manicured lawns, young trees and flower beds surround the building. After years of planning, controversy, court proceedings and construction, this week the grounds look almost as if they had been waiting for this particular moment to bloom.

And for a few weeks, everyone is invited inside.

Beginning Thursday, Aug. 27, and continuing through Saturday, Sept. 12, excluding Sundays, the Cody Wyoming Temple will open its doors to the general public. People of any faith, or no faith at all, will have a rare opportunity to walk through a Latter-day Saint temple and see rooms that, following the building’s dedication, will be reserved for faithful members of the church only. 

No special ticket or reservation is required. Visitors can simply arrive and take the approximately 45-minute walking tour.

For many Big Horn Basin residents, it will be their first opportunity to see what is actually inside a Latter-day Saint temple and perhaps to better understand why temples occupy such an important place in the faith.

A different kind of church

The interior of the temple is equally striking and, for those unfamiliar with Latter-day Saint worship, perhaps eye-opening.

A temple is very different from the Latter-day Saint meetinghouses found in nearly every community throughout the Big Horn Basin.

Young men do not gather in the temple for basketball, nor are young women there to challenge them to a quick game of hoops. There are no Primary classrooms filled with restless children struggling to sit through a Sunday lesson. There are no Sunday School classes or weekly sacrament meetings where an entire congregation gathers for prayers, hymns, talks and the blessing and passing of bread and water.

Those familiar activities take place in local Latter-day Saint meetinghouses. A temple is reserved for a different kind of worship.

Instead, the interior is divided into carefully appointed rooms, each intended for particular forms of worship and sacred ordinances.

Among those are sealings, in which couples are married with the belief that their marriage and family relationships can continue beyond death. There is also the endowment, during which members receive religious instruction and make covenants, or promises, with God. Members commonly receive their endowment before serving a church mission or being married in a temple.

One of the most distinctive Latter-day Saint beliefs is that these ordinances can also be performed on behalf of people who have died. During baptisms for the dead, living members are baptized by proxy on behalf of deceased individuals.

They believe those ancestors remain free to accept or reject the ordinances in the afterlife. Performing an ordinance does not, in church belief, automatically make the deceased person a Latter-day Saint.

That emphasis on ancestors and family relationships helps explain both the church’s enormous interest in genealogy and why temples carry such deep meaning for its members.

For the next few weeks, visitors can see the rooms where all of this takes place.

A difficult road

The five years since the Cody temple was announced have not been without controversy.

What began as excitement among many local Latter-day Saints became a difficult and sometimes emotional dispute involving the church, the City of Cody and residents living near the proposed site.

At the center of the disagreement was the temple’s steeple. The 4.69-acre site off Skyline Drive is in a Rural Residential zone where buildings are generally limited to 30 feet in height. While the main temple building is considerably lower, the steeple reaches nearly 101 feet.

The question became whether the steeple legally counted toward the city’s building-height restriction. City officials ultimately determined that it did not. Opponents argued that allowing a structure reaching more than 100 feet into the skyline violated the intent of Cody’s zoning rules and would change the character of the neighborhood.

Lighting became another major point of contention. Nearby residents worried about a brightly illuminated temple and steeple changing the nighttime skyline. A compromise eventually placed restrictions on overnight lighting, but efforts to reach a similar compromise over the height of the steeple failed.

The disagreement filled public meetings and generated hundreds of written comments. One Planning and Zoning meeting stretched for roughly six hours, with more than 50 people speaking.

Eventually the disagreement moved from Cody City Hall into the courts.

Nearby residents organized as Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods and challenged the city’s approvals. The legal dispute continued through 2024 and into 2025 before reaching the Wyoming Supreme Court.

In June 2025, the state’s highest court upheld a lower court decision dismissing the neighborhood group’s challenges because they had not been filed within the required time period. The court did not decide the underlying question of whether a nearly 101-foot steeple was appropriate for the site. Instead, it concluded that the challenges had been filed too late for the courts to consider those arguments.

The controversy left some hard feelings behind. There had been frustration, confusion, disappointment and, at times, distrust among people who had long considered themselves neighbors and friends.

But buildings, like communities, eventually move beyond the arguments surrounding their construction.

The construction equipment is disappearing. Grass has taken root. Trees have been planted. Flowers are blooming. And perhaps the public open house provides an opportunity for people on all sides of the disagreement to walk through the doors, see what was built and begin a new chapter.

A long journey

For Latter-day Saints in the Big Horn Basin, however, the significance of having a temple in Cody stretches much farther back than the controversy of the past few years.

It reaches to the first large groups of Latter-day Saint settlers who arrived in the Basin more than 130 years ago.

Families began establishing Burlington in 1895, and within a few years thousands of Latter-day Saint settlers were building communities around Byron, Cowley and Lovell.

They built irrigation canals, farms, homes, schools and churches. But one important part of their religion remained hundreds of miles away. The temple.

For those early generations, being married in a temple or participating in other temple ordinances required a substantial journey south. For decades, the Logan, Utah Temple, dedicated in 1884, was the nearest practical temple for many Big Horn Basin families.

For families living in the Basin around 1900, the same journey was a major undertaking involving horses, wagons and increasingly the railroad.

That began to change in 1945 when the Idaho Falls Idaho Temple was dedicated. A temple was finally considerably closer to northern Wyoming, although attending still meant a journey of hundreds of miles.

Another dramatic change came in 1999 with the dedication of the Billings Montana Temple.

For Latter-day Saints from around the Big Horn Basin, Billings transformed temple attendance from a major trip into something that could more easily be accomplished in a day.

Now that journey has become shorter still.

For the first time since Latter-day Saint pioneers began settling the Big Horn Basin in the 1890s, a temple stands within the Basin itself.

There is something remarkable in that progression.

The first generations traveled hundreds of miles toward Utah. Their descendants later drove to Idaho Falls. Beginning in 1999, they traveled north to Billings.

Beginning this fall, many will simply drive to Cody.

Opening the doors

For the moment, however, the temple does not belong only to those who will eventually worship there.

During the open house, its doors are open to everyone.

That includes Latter-day Saints who have waited nearly five years to see the completed building, neighbors who opposed its location or design, members of other faiths, people curious about what their Latter-day Saint friends and neighbors believe and those who simply want to see inside a building they have watched rise above Cody.

Once the public open house concludes September 12, the temple will close for a final cleaning and preparation.

On Sunday, Oct. 25, Elder Clark G. Gilbert of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles is scheduled to formally dedicate the Cody Wyoming Temple. After the dedication, entrance will be limited to church members who hold a current temple recommend.

At that point, the building will become much quieter than it will be during these next few weeks.

How the temple came to stand in Cody is part of its history and should not be forgotten. A dedication ceremony cannot erase those disagreements or pretend they never happened. But the controversy is not the entire story.

For local Latter-day Saints, more than 130 years of waiting, traveling and praying have finally led to this moment.

A temple has come to them.