Sun Ranch and Devil's Gate

Tom Sun, a French-Canadian frontiersman, started a cattle ranch beside Devil's Gate in 1872, on the emigrant road where the Sweetwater cuts through the granite, and his family ran it for well over a century. By 1882 it was already held up as a model western cattle ranch, and in 1960 it was made a National Historic Landmark. The family kept a room of the ranch house as a museum of their own history.

In 1996 the Suns sold the ranch, about 13,000 acres with grazing permits on some 80,000 more, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for whom the cove a few miles away is a sacred place: the Martin handcart company sheltered there in November 1856. The church restored the ranch house as its visitor center. The cove itself is federal land, and the church's attempts to buy it drew opposition in Congress and among trail historians. It took a lease from the Bureau of Land Management instead, later a 25-year lease running from 2004 to 2029, and an ACLU suit over the proselytizing of visitors on the way to the cove ended in a settlement. In 2026 a proposed land trade that would give the church the 933 acres around the cove was again gaining support.

Trails lead from the ranch to Devil's Gate and to the cove, and the church lends handcarts to those who want to pull one.