The new mystery owner of Wyoming’s massive Pathfinder Ranches — larger than Rhode Island — has finally been revealed, and, as Cowboy State Daily previously reported, it is indeed not Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The mystery buyer turns out to have been a neighbor of the Pathfinder Ranches all along.
Chris Robinson, who is CEO of Salt Lake City-based Ensign Group, L.C., is the mystery man behind the company that bought the 916,000-acre Pathfinder Ranches, a historic sale of one of the largest operating ranches in Wyoming.
The property had listed for $79.5 million last year and grabbed headlines for its size, which is double the size of Jacksonville, Florida, America’s largest city by land area in the Lower 48.
That size is also larger than the fictional “Yellowstone” Dutton Ranch, from Taylor Sheridan’s famous television series, which was supposed to be between 775,000 to 825,000 acres.
The deeded acreage for the ranch is 99,188 acres. The rest come from leases. The ranch, with leases, has a capacity of 90,444 Animal Unit Months, or AUM. That is a measure of how much livestock a given area of rangeland can reasonably support.
The sales price is not being disclosed, Swan Land Company real estate broker and listing agent Scott Williams told Cowboy State Daily. The land sale is one of the largest the company has done in Wyoming.
“This is what we specialize in are the large complicated transactions,” he said. “And the beauty of this is the buyers are excellent ranchers, but they’re also conservation-minded operators as well.”
About Ensign Group
Ensign Group already owns and operates around 1 million acres across Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah, and was already the owner of Pathfinder’s neighbor, the Stone Ranch. The company is co-owned by Robinson, Alexander Robinson, and Victoria Robinson.
Robinson is also an elected member of the Summit County Council in Utah, and long been involved in conservation. He said his company purchased the Stone Ranch four years ago from the children of the family who had sold a large portion of the original Pathfinder, back in the 1970s.
Stone Ranch is a bridge between the two halves of Pathfinder Ranches.
“So, we’re kind of reuniting that, and we intend to, we’re operators,” he said. “We’re not generally landlords. We’re going to, over time, grow into it, where we’re mostly running our own livestock on it.”
That’s a plan that will take some time to realize, Robinson said.
“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.”
The Pathfinder Ranch right now has around 800 to 1,000 mother cows. However, with the combined ranch holdings in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming, Ensign Group owns about 13,000 cows.
“There are a lot of bigger landowners and a lot of bigger cattle operators,” Robinson said. “But with the cows — the factories — we are one of the larger (for that).”
That’s positioned his ranch to help regrow America’s herd, which is at its smallest size in more than 70 years at 86.7 million head as of January 2025. That’s being driven by several things, including drought and inflation. The border with Mexico has also been closed of late, due to an outbreak of screwworm.
“There are a lot of people who buy other people’s calves by the tens of thousands of them,” he said. “But to produce the calves, there aren’t that many of us. So we’re up there.”