Elk County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Elk County

Fourteen hundred free-roaming elk (Cervus canadensis nelsoni, the Rocky Mountain subspecies) walk the wooded ridges and reclaimed strip-mine meadows of north-central Pennsylvania today — descendants of 177 animals trans-shipped by the Pennsylvania Game Commission from Yellowstone National Park between 1913 and 1926 to restore an Eastern Woodlands elk population that had been hunted to extinction in the state by 1877. The reintroduction was the largest and most enduring of several similar early-20th-century elk-restoration projects across the Appalachian region; the Pennsylvania herd grew, struggled, and stabilized through the 1980s when a deliberate Pennsylvania Game Commission habitat-restoration program (cooperatively reclaiming abandoned bituminous strip-mine lands as elk grazing meadow with the help of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation) transformed the population trajectory and produced the modern self-sustaining herd.

Elk County PA is the population epicenter, and the official Elk Country Visitor Center in Benezette (population 217) — operated cooperatively by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the PA DCNR, and the Keystone Elk Country Alliance — anchors a paved viewing platform, three trail loops, and 38-acre conservation campus with parking accommodating rigs to 45 ft. The September-October rut is the canonical viewing window, with bugling bull elk audible from the visitor center deck at dawn and dusk and traffic on PA-555 (the Elk Scenic Drive) backing up for blocks during peak afternoons. Elk County's 832 sq mi wrap the western Allegheny National Forest, the headwaters of the Clarion River, and Ridgway (population 4,021, the county seat and the manufacturing town that the Stackpole steel-fabrication and graphite-product family built in the early 20th century). The Pennsylvania Wilds tourism brand markets the entire region as a contiguous outdoors destination. Allegheny National Forest's Marienville Ranger District permits 14-day dispersed camping at signed sites along the Tionesta Creek and East Branch Clarion River Reservoir corridors with rigs to 30 ft accommodated. Bendigo State Park and S.B. Elliott State Park nearby accept rigs to 35 ft. Elk State Forest dispersed camping requires a free permit from the local DCNR forest district office.