MARTIN'S COVE, Wyo. (AP) — Most people who visit Martin's Cove in southwestern Natrona County are interested in learning the Mormon history surrounding the tragic winter of 1856.
But some visitors to the cove, which sits on public land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and is leased to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, want to visit the site for its historic and natural beauty and avoid any religious messages.
For ElDean Holliday, director of Mormon handcart sites in Wyoming and chief caretaker of Martin's Cove, this poses a problem for the church: How can the church provide a strong, religious and moral experience for followers interested in the spiritual history of a site considered sacred and at the same time provide a secular experience for nonfollowers?
"We're the only LDS site in the world that doesn't proselytize," Holliday said. "I instructed our guides to only tell about the historic stories and not to go into detail about religious topics. If visitors ask the guides specific religious questions, they will answer them, but they're not here to preach."
The process has not been easy.
A public access parking lot and trail bypass the LDS visitor center and join the main trail leading to the cove, but in the warmer months and especially during the summer, hundreds of church members dressed in period costumes inhabit the whole area.
"We had 43 couples move in in April, and they will stay here for six months," Holliday said.
The couples live in their own trailers at a nearby missionary village and spend most of their time working around the visitor center and cove, he said.
"Most of the volunteers are retired people," Holliday said. "Dentists, orthodontists, college professors, farmers, ranchers and contractors all work together toward a common goal. (The work they do here) gives people a chance to relive history and step out of the current hustle-bustle of life.
"I think a lot of our older volunteers serve because they enjoy helping people," he said.
Holliday, who is from Preston, Idaho, began his two-year church mission at the cove in January. This will be his seventh mission for the church. Besides telling a good, clean joke, he enjoys talking about one of his 17 grandchildren, Jared Hess, director of the film "Napoleon Dynamite."
While Holliday has a small cameo in the film, he really enjoys how the movie promotes decent values without using any bad language. Relating to young men and women and helping them accept the faith in their lives is a continuing challenge for the church, especially in today's modern world.
"A lot of young people find themselves when they come out here," he said. "Young people are often very confused by all the messages around them. In just three days, they have a great attitude change."
Max Bruff, a summer volunteer and vice president of a farm management company in Salt Lake City, echoed the statement.
"Going through these experiences (at the cove) helps teenagers relate to their parents," Bruff said. "It humbles them."
During the summer, the center gets hundreds of visitors a week. Many of them are families looking for a little old-fashioned fun and family bonding time.
"When we take the families out, we have them all help pull the handcarts" across the bumpy ground, Holliday said. "Some of the carts can easily weigh 500 pounds when they're loaded up with food and clothes. There is a point in the trail where it gets sandy and a little steep, making it more difficult to pull. At this point, we take the men and boys aside and have them watch as the women and girls try to pull the cart by themselves. It's difficult, and they struggle, but the men are not allowed to help. Watching their family members struggle is very difficult for the men. It changes them and gives them more compassion."
This kind of compassion can't be learned from books and TV and the Internet, he said.
"The experience we offer helps people who want to live moral and chaste lives," Holliday said. "We promote family unity."
Like many volunteers at the center, Holliday has ancestors who were Mormon handcart settlers. His great-grandfather, John Comish, was in the handcart party that was stranded at the cove during the October 1856 blizzard in which some 200 people died from starvation and exposure before rescue teams arrived from Salt Lake City.
Holliday's wife, Peggy, also had ancestors who traveled with handcarts during that time.
"There are not a lot of areas any more where we can be pioneers," Peggy Holliday said. "The courage of our ancestors is what makes America great. They made a lot possible for us."
The Hollidays have had to give up a lot of modern conveniences to work at the cove, where they also live.
"We all have to make sacrifices, even if it's not easy and not convenient," Peggy said.
She said living at the cove is "an opportunity to step back in time and remember the challenges and sacrifices that early settlers made."
Most of the volunteers share an interest in their ancestors and a desire to help young people appreciate history, she said.
"I have confidence that their appreciation of history will deepen," ElDean said. "If the challenge is there, people will rise to the occasion."
Holliday said that before the LDS Church bought the Tom Sun Ranch from the Sun family in 1996, few people visited the cove. The church built the visitor center on the site of the old Sun Ranch, which was renamed the Mormon Handcart Ranch.
In 1997, the first year of operation, an estimated 70,000 pilgrims visited the ranch, according to a lawsuit filed this year. As a result, the BLM and the LDS Church entered into an agreement to allow visitors into the cove and to Devil's Gate, a nearby split in the mountains.
Before signing the lease with the LDS Church, the BLM did an environmental assessment and found no adverse effects on the land or the public from church management.
The BLM signed a 25-year lease with church officials last year, giving the church management control of 933 acres in exchange for annual payments of $16,000.
In November, the Alliance for Historic Wyoming and Americans United for Separation of Church and State appealed the decision, saying in part the valuation of the Martin's Cove site was "arbitrary, capricious, as well as an abuse of discretion." And the American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the lease in federal court, arguing that it was improper for the government to give the church "complete and unfettered control over both an important federally owned historic site and the message that visitors to the site receive."
In the meantime, Holliday said he and his colleagues will try to make Martin's Cove as interesting and informative as possible, while trying to appeal to two different types of visitors: those who seek a strong, religious experience, and those who don't.