We report for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, on a large mode area Er-doped photonic crystal fiber laser system. The fiber core had a diameter of 40 μm and NA of 0.04 leading to a mode field diameter of about 31 μm around 1550 nm wavelength. More than 70 W of single-frequency output power at 1556 nm could be extracted using a master-oscillator power-amplifier scheme. Near diffraction limited output beam quality has been verified by measuring the TEM00 content with a nonconfocal scanning ring cavity.