North Shore Hwy 61

Many Cook County residents know Okontoe, which the Pattens call home, as a place for magical night-time sleigh rides behind a team of Belgian horses. And Okontoe, 27 miles up the Trail from Grand Marais, is that. Indeed, the sleigh-ride season now is in full swing. But sleigh-ride magic hardly begins to capture all that takes place on the 100 acres and in the 20-plus buildings of Okontoe, situated between Bow and Quiver Lakes.

At any time, the Patten family may share their dinner table with newly released convicts seeking a fresh start, teenagers requiring help to put their feet on a strong, healthy path for life and weary adults seeking safety and a chance to regroup and refocus. All are welcome, free of charge. Some stay a month; others call Okontoe home for years. The only requirements are that you work hard, join in, talk straight and embrace the strong Christian focus of the Okontoe Fellowship, which is the full name of the non-profit Patten ministry.

“We've had 125 people live here for a month to eight years at a time,” Mark Patten said. “We've also had thousands of young people come through for summer discipleship camps. We're all one extended family.”

As a consequence of their missionary work among the First Nations of Ontario, Mark Patten said, “We've had a number of native young people sent down to live with us. All different flavors of people come through here. That's the heart of our existence.”

In summer, a number of churches hold retreats at Okontoe, and a few families known well to the Pattens lease lots on which they park their travel trailers. Each Sunday, families from the Gunflint gather at Okontoe for services in the chapel. Long days of work are punctuated by prayer groups, Bible studies and similar gatherings. Local families are welcome to visit Okontoe in the summer, Nancy Patten said, if they are “looking for a safe, quiet place to have a picnic and let their children play on the beach.”

Nancy and Mark Patten are not the least bashful about their Christian faith and their ministry. Neither are they pushy or judgmental. They simply live their faith daily and invite others to join them. They smile a lot.

Okontoe always has exuded a Christian atmosphere, but for years that was in the context of operating as a commercial campground. Mark Patten explains that Nancy's parents, Presbyterians returning from long-term missionary work in India, “didn't want to go back to a regular church. They wanted to create a church without walls, and that's what they found here at Okontoe.”

Four years ago, the Pattens changed their focus: “We went from being a campground with a ministry to being a ministry with a campground,” Nancy Patten said. Families still are welcome to camp at Okontoe, she said, but it's not emphasized.

Okontoe Fellowship is an official nonprofit with a board of directors. Most of the funds to finance the fellowship, Nancy Patten said, come from donations sent by churches and individuals who support the Okontoe mission. The winter sleigh rides, Mark Patten said, “pay for the hay and other things we need for the horses,” which pull the sleighs. That's no small thing, Patten said, because the large horses, weighing from 1,900 to 2,200 pounds “eat two-to-three times what a regular horse eats.”

But the four Belgians – Cap, Rex, Bob and Duke – pay for their keep in another way, too: Mark Patten estimates that they produce 48,000 pounds of manure each year. That manure provides the backbone for the soil the Pattens use in 4,000 square feet of raised vegetable beds. Those beds provide much of the food consumed by the Patten family and their multitude of guests. Summer is dominated by tending the gardens, late summer and fall by putting up what the gardens have produced.

“We canned over 250 quarts worth of pickles (many kinds!) and green beans,” the Pattens wrote in the fall Okontoe Fellowship newsletter. “We had quite a crew working working together with the young people here and with some of you who came to visit... . We also put up hundreds of pounds of potatoes, carrots and squash. Thank you Lord for your incredible bounty!”

It would take an incredibly hard heart for someone of any faith – or of none at all – to repress a smile at the Pattens and the work they do at Okontoe.