The mysterious buyer of a Wyoming ranch four times larger than New York City and bigger than the state of Rhode Island has been identified as a chief executive officer and local politician who already owns a million acres of land.
Christopher Robinson, the CEO of Ensign Group L.C., scooped up the massive 916,000-acre Pathfinder Ranches on behalf of the landholding company and closed the deal on Jan. 14, according to KPCW.
Robinson purchased the land for an undisclosed amount, only four years after he bought the neighboring Stone Ranch.
The massive property, which rolls across 1,431-square-miles, was listed over the summer by Swan Land Company broker Scott Williams for a whopping $79.5 million. New York City spans across 300.4 square miles, while Rhode Island spans 1,033.9.
Spreading across four counties in the Rocky Mountains, the Pathfinder Ranches is made up of four separate properties and encompasses over 1% of the land in the Cowboy State.
Actual deedage acreage of the historic purchase added up to 99,188 acres with the additional land coming from leases, according to the Cowboy State Daily.
The Park City, Utah resident is using the smaller ranch to bridge together the Pathfinder Ranches properties and create a self-sustainable livestock range.
“So, we’re kind of reuniting that, and we intend to, we’re operators,” Robinson told the outlet. “We’re not generally landlords. We’re going to, over time, grow into it, where we’re mostly running our own livestock on it.”
Robinson plans to work the property’s livestock to become self-sufficient rather than buying from outside the ranch.
The land was estimated to have a capacity of 90,444 Animal Unit Months, the amount of livestock a rangeland can support.
“With cattle prices as high as they are, we’re not going to be buying any mother cows to stock,” he said. “We keep a lot of heifers back anyway, so we’re going to grow internally.”
“If things get really tough, we’ll get rid of yearlings,” he said. “But we don’t get rid of mother cows. There have been droughts and things in the past, but we’ve got enough scale and flexibility that we can sell the yearlings.”
The Ensign Group, co-owned by Robinson and his siblings Alexander and Victoria Robinson, has acquired over 1 million acres of private and public lands throughout Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming under the Ensign Ranches moniker.
Before the massive purchase, the Robinson and Freed portfolio ranked at number 31 on Land Report Magazine’s Top 100 Landowner List.
Pathfinder Ranches may push the group’s portfolio to over 470,000 acres up 10 spots on the list and surpassing billionaire Jeff Bezos’ own impressive 462,000 acres, according to KPCW.
“We love land and water. We think it’s a good long-term investment, and we like the opportunities it affords us to be stewards over a piece of God’s creation,” Robinson said.
Robinson, a graduate from the University of Utah, is one of the five members of the Summit County Council, a seat he has held since his election in 2008, according to the county’s website.
He has extensive experience in production agriculture, local government, mineral and resource development, public lands, renewable energy and conservation efforts.
In December, Robinson announced that he would not run for reelection.
Robinson is also on the board of several conservation and land groups in the Utah area.
The newly purchased land is also home to a diverse ecosystem of wildlife including housing the US’s first sage-grouse conservation bank.”
“It’s a statewide bank that, if there’s any damage to, disturbance to, core habitat for greater sage-grouse, one option for mitigation would be to buy credits from the Pathfinder,” Robinson told the outlet. “[The property has] got a lot of sage grouse on it, a lot of antelope, pronghorn, deer and elk. It’s teeming with life.”
The property, named after rolling foothills, high plains and broad river valleys, is a cowboy’s dream and one of Swan Land’s largest sales in Wyoming.
“This is what we specialize in are the large complicated transactions,” Williams told the Cowboy State Daily. “And the beauty of this is the buyers are excellent ranchers, but they’re also conservation-minded operators as well.
“That’s a plan that will take some time to realize,” Robinson said.
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