A Temple In Manti

One thing that makes travel so interesting, is that you never know what will be around the next corner. Manti is a very small town in the Sanpete Valley on US-89, about 120 miles south of Salt Lake City. According to information on the Manti Utah Temple website, it is sited on 17 acres, has an area of 86,809 square feet, and was dedicated May 17, 1888. Interestingly, this date predates the dedication of the temple in Salt Lake City by five years. This is one of 95 temples the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have around the world.

Arguably the most beautiful of the pioneer temples, the Manti temple is a near twin to the Logan Temple on the outside, only the upper towers are different. The open center spiral staircases are a miracle of 19th Century engineering and are extremely rare and beautiful. The yearly Manti Pagent, which reinacts scenes from the Book of Mormon and Church History, takes place on the south hill of the temple. The Manti Temple is the only temple with murals surviving from the pioneer period. The temple is built of oolite sandstone quaried from the hill on which the temple stands.

This is one picture that I really wish we'd have turned around and gone back to do it right. When we first saw it, this white hill with the red base was perfectly reflected in the little lake at its base. The wind was still and the lake was a perfect mirror. It would have been one of those pictures that really made you look hard to see which side was up.

Farther south on US-89, this huge house caught our attention just because it was so big. It is way out of scale with the other structures in the neighborhood.

We decided to get on I-70 at Salina. This was uncrowded and a pleasure to travel. The landscape pretty well covered the spectrum of the painter's pallet. The green fields in the valleys sat against the red and white hills, and all of this with the blue, blue sky in the background.