Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Two elk graze along Bennett's Branch of the Sinnemahoning Creek near Weedville.
	Map: Where the elk roam
	Rawley Cogan, the northeast lands program manager for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

WEEDVILLE, Elk County -- We are headed north in a pickup truck on the snaking, rural, two-lane blacktop that is state Route 555, following the Bennett Branch of Sinnemahoning Creek and looking for "critters."

That's what cowboy-hatted Rawley Cogan calls the big-antlered elk that inhabit Pennsylvania's northern tier woodlands and look like Santa's reindeer on steroids. The search for such charismatic mega-fauna is a good way to pass time on a trip to the newest public land addition to their 835-square-mile range.

Our destination is a 1,378-acre tract in Clinton County, purchased from a private landowner for $1.2 million by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and deeded to the state as an addition to Sproul State Forest two weeks ago.

Known as the Kettle Creek Project, it has frontage on Kettle Creek and the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, both of which are polluted by abandoned mine drainage coming off the site. It is surrounded by state forest land and the Bucktail Natural Area.

"It's land along the river and creek and highly sought after for cabins and second home development. It also happens to be a riparian area that offers good wintering habitat for elk," said Mr. Cogan, a former field biologist with the Pennsylvania Game Commission and now northeast lands program manager for the Elk Foundation. "It was high on our priority list."

The Elk Foundation, started in 1984, is a land trust based in Missoula, Mont., that has purchased elk habitat lands in 16 states. It has bought more than 8,000 acres in Pennsylvania's expanded elk range to protect elk habitat, and either given or sold the properties to the state's game commission, forest bureau or parks department.

"We wanted to protect this tract in perpetuity, and as a private nonprofit, the Elk Foundation was able to act quickly on the purchase, quicker probably than the state could," said Arnold Olsen, director of lands for the foundation, who flew in from Missoula for a look at the property.

He's along for the 45-mile ride to the project on a segment of the state's Elk Scenic Drive, a twisting, 127-mile corridor through steep, creek-cut valleys traveled by many of the 75,000 people who, mostly in the fall, venture north of Interstate 80 to view foliage and the biggest elk herd east of the Mississippi River.

'Wilds' program centerpiece
Numbering almost 700 in a range that sprawls across Elk, Cameron, Clinton and Centre counties, Pennsylvania's elk, hunted to extinction in 1867 and reintroduced using animals from the Rocky Mountains and South Dakota starting in 1913, are thriving. The herd has become a centerpiece of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources' Pennsylvania Wilds marketing campaign that aims to attract tourism dollars to the northern tier counties.

Signs advertising the Elk View Diner, Elk Country Store, Sleepy Elk Lodge and Wapiti Woods speak to the success of that attraction. So do road signs admonishing tourists not to obstruct vehicle traffic and to "respect private property" in their quest to view and photograph elk.

Those messages subtly underscore a love-hate relationship with the elk herd in an area of the state where half the land is publicly owned and private property rights are, for some, a second religion.

"The generic goal of the Game Commission is to allow the herd to increase within the tolerance of biologic and sociological limits," Mr. Cogan said. "In real terms, this area could support a lot more elk than it's willing to tolerate."

One of the reasons the Elk Foundation spends money to purchase private lands and turn acreage over to the state, Mr. Cogan said, is to reduce private property conflicts such as the one in 1999 when a farmer shot nine elk that wandered out of Sproul State forest and began eating his feed corn. That 15-acre farm along the Susquehanna River is located little more than a mile from the Kettle Creek Project.

"About two-thirds of the elk range is on public lands," Mr. Cogan said. "We want to add to the public lands so that we can attract the elk there to feed and keep the conflicts to a minimum."

A place to disappear
That there are ever conflicts or traffic jams in this sparsely settled region of the state is more than surprising. At this time of year, there are few cars on the road. We pass cornfields cut down to tawny stubble and zip, in a blink, through small towns -- Medix Run, Benezette, Castle Garden and Driftwood -- that are little more than crossroads and that are fast into their hibernations, even without their seasonal blanket of snow.

Mr. Cogan guns his big Dodge Ram One Ton along Route 555 and onto Route 120, winding through a wooded valley that has the look of a giant whisk-broom, reedy with slender, second-growth trees and winter brown. Although we can see far into the leafless woods, the elk are making themselves scarce in the middle of this day.

As Mr. Cogan rounds a bend a few miles south of Westport, he has to brake to a stop. A large tree has fallen across the road, completely blocking traffic and necessitating a lengthy detour up along the ridge on a steep and narrow state forest road that could use a guardrail.

We're supposed to meet Doug D'Amore, the district forester at Sproul State Forest, who has agreed to take us onto gated portions of the recently acquired land, but we can't call him, even while traversing the ridge top, because there's no cell phone service.

"There are still places in the state where elk can disappear, cell phones don't work and trees blow down across a road and no one cares," Mr. Cogan muses as he wheels around one more hairpin coming off the ridge. "There could be worse problems."

Bitumen, where the new plot is located, was an old mining village built over a long-abandoned deep mine that operated from the 1880s until the end of World War I. It's flanked by strip mines that closed in the late 1970s. We drive past maybe a dozen cabins and camps that dot the new forest acreage along Bitumen Road.

Our two-car caravan bounces off the macadam and along a deeply rutted, muddy trail to Duck Hollow, where the old coal waste bleeds through the thin topsoil and only four-wheel-drives get through. The whole property has been logged at least once and the tree and grass plantings on the reclaimed strip mine land are stunted and scraggly.

"That's not really a problem because elk thrive in mine reclamation areas," said Mr. Olsen, explaining that a variety of clovers, alfalfa and orchard grasses will be planted by the foundation to attract the elk herd to this winter range.

The biggest problems on the property are multiple, acidic abandoned mine discharges that pour out of the deep mine and into the Susquehanna's West Branch and Kettle Creek. The creek is one of the best and most popular trout streams in the state, further up the watershed but dead below Bitumen.

Mr. D'Amore said the addition of the Bitumen property to Sproul State Forest will provide the room for the state, working with the local Trout Unlimited Chapter, to install mine water treatment facilities.

"This property has provided us with a lot more options than what we had in October," Mr. D'Amore said. "One of our major goals is to restore the fish life in the West Branch and Kettle, and one of the big things clobbering both of those streams is this mine."

Successful treatment of the mine water could help restore the fishery on up to 30 miles of river and creek, and also expand tourism opportunities, said Mr. D'Amore, who also acknowledged some local opposition to the expansion of public land and the influx of tourists.

"This area, with its mines and timber, had an industrial base. We had no historic tourism economy, and so, for some, there is no knowledge that it can work," he said. "But this is all part of the Pennsylvania Wilds plan to get the local tourism economy developed and work it into the fabric of the communities."

On the way back to Weedville, just before one of the shortest days of the year dissolves into the gloaming, we spot a dozen elk wading in the Bennett Branch just north of Benezette, then six more in the trees between the road and the stream. We get out and walk into the woods for a better look.

Two elk graze along Bennett's Branch of the Sinnemahoning Creek near Weedville.