“My goal is to leave this a better place than I found it.”

Mike Patten grew up in the land and forestry business. From an early age, he learned to love and respect the woods from his grandfather, a woodsman. “My early memories of the woods were when I caught my first brook trout with him in the Swift River, and we sat up there by the river with an old Coleman cooler and cooked those brook trout in a frying pan. I remember that to this day. Little things like that got me hooked.”

It has been his dream to someday live in a wilderness lodge surrounded by land large enough to get lost in and to produce goods from his ranch. “A lot of the things I grew up with are a dying way of life. Things are different. The world is moving faster, society has changed. A lot of the work I do now is geared around that forgotten way of life.”