As executive director of the Allegheny National Forest Visitors Bureau, Linda Devlin didn’t just leave big shoes to fill, she left “Tracks Across the Sky.”

Devlin led the ANFVB from its inception for 26 years – to the day – until her retirement March 1.

“It was a great run,” Devlin said. “I loved what I did. It wasn’t a job to me. I was passionate about working to improve the area through tourism.”

When the bureau got its start in 1998, tourism promotion was not funded by the state.

Devlin recalled the first project they did was a “travelogue on Route 6 with Channel 10.” The bureau recruited gifted students from Port Allegany School District as talent for the project, which was self-supported through community contributions.

“Everybody in the community helped,” Devlin recalled. “We held the premiere out at Pitt (Bradford); Zippo sent a limo to pick up the students — they were our stars with the red carpet and everything.”

Devlin explained that was the bureau’s first step, money spent on a promotion, because it opened the door for matching funds from the state.

The bureau’s next big achievement was its role in the passage of the room, or hotel occupancy, tax. Devlin explained McKean County’s class as a smaller district prevented it from passing a room tax independently such as bigger counties like Erie and Philadelphia were able to do locally.

“We had no steady stream of funding,” Devlin explained. “We had to have legislation passed to establish a room tax.”

Once enacted, “That really put us on solid footing,” Devlin said, adding the bureau was able to then move from a space in her home to its current location in the rented office at the Old Post Office on East Corydon Street.

Their next big project was the “Tracks Across the Sky” documentary about saving the Kinzua Viaduct, a partnership between multiple funding partners, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and WPSU public television.

“It was going to be a Disney story because we were saving the bridge,” Devlin said. “We had the film crew there the day before the tornado happened. Then we had to rewrite our script as a disaster film because our bridge went down.”

The nationally distributed documentary remains in circulation today, she noted, adding the story put the ANF region on the national map.

The bridge’s collapse in 2003 was certainly disastrous, but all was not lost as the bureau and other key individuals shared a vision for today’s wildly popular Kinzua Bridge State Park and Sky Walk.

The bureau worked closely with legislators Sen. Joseph Scarnati, Rep. Martin Causer, then DCNR Secretary Michael DiBerardinis and engineer Gene Comoss, the first director of DCNR’s Bureau of Facility Design and Construction, to make it happen.

“Of course the big project was the rehabilitation of the state park,” Devlin said. “Gene Comoss absolutely loved the structure; he was amazed by it — as all engineers are. He was totally in love with saving the bridge and was instrumental in helping us move things forward at the state level.”

Devlin explained the ANFVB paid for the park’s development plan, keeping things moving forward much more quickly than if the state would have had to find that funding.

She noted “writers who came from the UK wrote it up as one of the top 10 most scenic sky walks in the world.”

The park hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year and is the number one, most-visited site in McKean County. She added it was also rated by TripAdvisor as the number one state park in Pennsylvania.

Devlin said that, in addition to “bringing KBSP back up to a new level of visitation,” she is most proud of the role she and the bureau took in the advancement of the Knox and Kane Rail Trail.

A single-minded persistence in working with Janie French of Headwaters Charitable Trust and many others brought what was once only an idea to impactful fruition. The Mount Jewett to Kinzua Bridge (MJ2KB) Trail, a nearly 8-mile section of the 74-mile Knox & Kane Rail Trail, was named DCNR’s 2023 Trail of the Year. The McKean County portion of the trail, which when finished will run from KBSP to Cook Forest State Park, will be completed later this year, Devlin said.

The ANFVB was also integral in securing North Star Strategies’ extensive study of tourism development and promotion in the area, which resulted in the adoption of the area’s current Trail Central brand.

“That was a big step forward, too,” Devlin said. “People really do perceive us now as Trail Central. They can come here any time of year and enjoy any type of trail – from a scenic stroll around Marilla Bridges to the 90-plus miles on the North Country Trail where they can backpack and sleep on the ground if they want to. We’ve really fulfilled that brand promise.”

Devlin said the two and half decades she’s spent building that brand has “been a nice steady climb. We’ve made it through some major setbacks — the tornado, then 9/11 and COVID.”

Heading into her retirement, Devlin said, “I felt like, ‘OK, we’ve grown it this far, everything is going well. All it needs is the next person to come in and put that promotion and marketing behind it to continue what we’ve started. I think (recently named executive director) Rustin (Lippincott) is the right person to do that.

“We’re small,” Devlin said of the ANFVB, “but we’re mighty.”