After decades of neglecting the tourism potential of 2.1 million acres of public land and surrounding towns in 12 primarily rural, naturally spectacular, northern tier counties, the state plans to spend almost $200 million dollars to promote it.
Branded Pennsylvania Wilds by state marketers, the project focuses on a swath of rolling woodlands that blankets the Allegheny Plateau and drapes in lush folds across the Appalachians. It's a landscape where the state's bulging elk herd, tallest trees, grandest canyon, wildest woodlands and darkest skies can be found.
It's also a sparsely populated area where the political landscape is decidedly conservative, historically short on cooperation between the counties and long on distrust for any government not populated by neighbors. And a cyclical economy defined by natural resource extraction -- logging, wood products production, oil and natural gas drilling and mining -- has helped foster an underlying tension between development interests and conservationists. Read the Complete Story in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.