Visit Clarion County

    Our Trails Are Now Open!   Come to Clarion County for Good Clean Fun and Exercise!                                                                       Clarion County's many miles of surface or water trails are now available for folks to enjoy. The immediate Clarion area has a deep water area suited for motorboats. The Route 66 trail begins on Route 322 just West of the borough and extends many miles to Leeper and Northward. There's also the Campus Loop hiking trail in the borough near the Clarion University campus.   Cook Forest offers many miles for biking and hiking as well as the Clarion River for canoeing and Kayaking. The Pale Whale is a canoe outfitter near the bridge. Many cabins and campgrounds are available in the area.   Eas...

Browser address bar As we were building our business model for Visit Clarion we wanted to help many local businesses and organizations by linking to their websites. Quickly we ran across a problem. The Apple App Store and Google Play would not let websites with the “http” designation link from the Visit Clarion app. We dug into the situation and learned Google and others had a great concern for security. Too many hackers or middlemen were stealing passwords, credit card numbers and other private information. Beginning in 2016 a movement was begun by website browsers to upgrade security by implementing the “https” protocol designation. Many websites in Clarion County have not made the transfer to the more secure protocol. An informative article about it can be found in Wikipedia as well as other sources on the Internet. To make your website safer, contact your provider. They will help you ensure that your website uses the secure protocol https. HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer ...

How Stuff Happens When Local Groups Get an Idea and Work Together.                                     The History of the Autumn Leaf Festival The late Don Stroup, Lee Hufnagel and John "Poe" Haskell formed the Chamber of Commerce in 1953. Soon after, the discussion focused on how they could bring attention to our beautiful community. One of the gentlemen had been up north to a "Potato Festival" and suggested that Clarion could maybe do a similar type of festival. The three gentlemen thought   "Autumn Leaves" would be a great theme, thus the Autumn Leaf Festival was born. Their first projects were to create a town swimming pool and to join with the Clarion Teachers College (now Clarion University) and have the first Autumn Leaf Festival Parade.   It was a small parade that year with some b...

Groundswell Seeds Vol. 1.1 Groundswell – A movement of people using online and other ways to connect, take charge of their own experiences, and get what they need---information, support, ideas, products and services, and bargaining power ---from each other. Clarion County and it's surrounding rural areas have a beautiful natural landscape, wonderful industrious people, and Clarion University, a great place to learn. There is a need to grow internally by working together and by bringing more folks here to play, learn, work, and stay as new residents. Groundswell Seeds is the newsletter to stakeholders and the blog of “VisitClarion”. Visitclarion is a mobile app designed to inform local stakeholders and prospective visitors about events, amenities, and opportunities. We will provide information, ideas, products, services and many opportunities for participation   by local stakeholders as well as visitors from the outside world. Some of our focus will be on Loc...