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The company Summit County Councilmember Chris Robinson owns with his siblings Alexander and Victoria, The Ensign Group, L.C., closed on Pathfinder Ranches in Wyoming Jan. 14.

Pathfinder spans 916,000 acres and four counties in east central Wyoming. According to the broker, that’s 1% of Wyoming’s land mass and almost the size of Delaware.

Robinson said the property was assembled from a dozen ranches over the years. Ensign already held the 86,000-acre Stone Ranch in the middle of its eastern and western arms.

“The family from whom we bought the Stone Ranch used to own the heart of the Pathfinder, and they sold it in, say, 1975. And so we’re kind of reuniting it,” he told KPCW Jan. 16. “It’s now one big landscape.”

It’s a 50% expansion of Ensign’s grazing capacity, probably the family company’s largest single expansion, Robinson said. To him, it’s about both business and conservation.

“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.

Pathfinder is named for John C. Frémont, the 19th-century explorer, Army officer and U.S. Senator.

Swan Land Company, the broker, says the region includes parts of the North Platte River, original Pony Express Trail, Oregon Trail and Independence Rock, where numerous pioneers carved their names into history.

Pathfinder Ranches is also home to the country’s first “sage-grouse conservation bank,” according to the broker, which Ensign plans to keep operational.

“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 explained. “[The property has] got a lot of sage grouse on it, a lot of antelope, pronghorn, deer and elk. It’s teeming with life.”