Photo by Becky Polaski
Area lodging providers will soon begin offering postcards from a set of 12 that was recently produced by the Great Outdoors Visitors Bureau featuring sites and attractions from throughout Elk County. 

By Becky Polaski

Staff Writer

ST. MARYS – A series of 12 postcards highlighting some of the sights and recreational opportunities in Elk County will soon be made available at places of lodging throughout the area.
Carla Wehler, Great Outdoors Visitors Bureau Sales Director, said the scenes featured on the postcards are from throughout the different areas the county.
The postcards were created by the Great Outdoors Visitors Bureau as an Elk County Hotel Tax project.
“We’re going to be providing them to our lodging providers in Elk County who collect the hotel tax from their guests,” Wehler said. “When they have a guest staying with them that needs a postcard they can provide it to them to send out. In turn they’ll be getting out to new people and showing just what there is to do in Elk County.”
The postcards feature a variety of sites, including Straub Brewery and East Branch Dam, as well as activities such as fishing, hunting, hiking and biking.
“Straub Brewery is such a draw for tourists because a lot of people like to come in and do the brewery tour, so we thought that would be a good one to put in this first collection along with everything else,” Wehler said.
500 copies of each of the 12 postcards were printed during the first run. Wehler added that the Great Outdoors Visitors Bureau chose to have a local business print the postcards. The postcards were printed by Printing Plus in  St. Marys, which Wehler noted indicated that they will be able to run more copies of individual cards as they are needed.
“We’ve been told repeatedly by some of the business people throughout the county that a lot of visitors look for postcards,” Wehler said. “We didn’t have many available. They had some of them in past years, but didn’t really have any now so we thought it would be a good project that would be one that we could do and then expand upon as needed.”
The back of each card contains a brief description of what is depicted on the front as well as Elk County’s logo to indicate that the cards are part of a county-wide project.
According to Wehler, the postcards are currently available at the Ridgway and St. Marys chambers of commerce and will soon be available at other locations.
“I’m going to begin contacting lodging providers in the county to see if they are interested in getting a supply to have available for their guests,” Wehler said. “Any that read the article first and want to contact me directly can contact me by my e-mail and request copies and then I’ll get them to them.”
The postcard project is the first that has been undertaken by the Great Outdoors Visitors Bureau, though Wehler noted they would like to expand it to include their other five counties as well.
“This is just the first batch, but we tried to pick out some things that our different communities said were important,” Wehler said. “We didn’t want it to be just one community specific.”
In the future the Great Outdoors Visitors Bureau hopes to offer postcards featuring activities available in the area in other seasons.
“One other consideration that we had was our winter activities. We really didn’t touch on that in this set,” Wehler said. “We thought that this winter would give us the opportunity to collect some photos of maybe some ice fishing and other things that we could expand into having a four season type reach of the postcards. Right now they are focused pretty much on the summer related aspect of it. So we’re hoping to go into winter and collect some things that will help us do another series for next year.”