"There’s something very special about having faithful people to have callings in temples, and it takes a large number of people to operate temples," Elder Quentin L. Cook said about the Meridian Idaho Temple. "This is a place that I can see why the Lord would want a temple here, and I can see why the prophet determined that one should be here."
With the opening of its new Meridian Idaho Temple this week, the LDS Church will have six temples set in the state of Idaho, two in the Boise metropolitan area and two of the closest-in-proximity such edifices among all of its nearly 160 temples worldwide.
The distance between the Meridian and Boise temples is 8.8 geodesic miles — or the straight-line-on-a-map distance, similar to the phrase “as the crow flies.” If you’re walking from one temple to the other, it’s 11.4 miles; if driving between the two, it’s 11.8 miles.