BAXTER STATE PARK – Within view of Mount Katahdin, just a stone’s throw from the last remnants of Maine’s wilderness forest, workers are felling trees.

Each year, about 8,000 cords of lumber are logged inside the boundaries of Baxter State Park. This annual harvest is a far cry from the scope and style of the controversial logging being done in national forests.

But with the state of the economy, timber profits are becoming an increasingly important factor in any park’s budget.

Baxter is raising its camping fees significantly, citing a decline in timber sales as a primary factor.

However, longtime park director Irvin “Buzz” Caverly, who is known for his conservationist viewpoint, pledged that profits won’t win out over pines on his watch.

“Profit is important but it’s of a secondary nature to proper management,” Caverly said.

In creating his 200,000-acre park, Percival Baxter set aside about 29,000 acres for “scientific forestry” – a type of forest management the governor observed while traveling in Europe and hoped to bring back to his homeland.

The 1940s and ’50s were the days of truly unsustainable logging. In fact, more than half of what would become Baxter’s park had been heavily cut, driving down his purchase price.

“What is done in our forest today will help or harm the generations who follow us,” he wrote in 1955, just after his purchase.

The forest lay quiet for more than two decades, waiting for the young park to get on its feet. Park officials first contracted with the Maine Forest Service to begin harvesting the trees in 1982, taking 1,538 cords of wood from 271 acres. The harvest climbed to more than 7,000 cords from 792 acres by the mid-1980s, when public criticism of the intensive harvest forced a complete cessation of logging for three years.

“When you drove through what was supposed to be a showcase for forest management, you were looking at a lot of slash piles,” Caverly said.

Foresters were recruited to draft a new management plan, and small-scale forestry methods that weren’t being used anywhere else in Maine were chosen for Baxter.

“There was an evolution in our thinking,” said Jensen Bissell, park forester, who has been at Baxter since 1986. “We learned that our pace should be slow and deliberate.”

That means building fewer roads, paying logging crews for the quality of their work, and leaving a healthy forest canopy by practicing a type of forestry that uses small gaps. Areas that are cut top out at 1/10th of an acre – the size hole that might be created by a natural phenomenon such as wind or fire.

“Our goal is not to generate tons of money, but to provide an example of sustainable forestry,” Bissell said. “We think that we can display types of management that will, over the long term, be very profitable – the real rewards are down the road.”

Revenue from timber sales averages about $150,000 annually. Last year, however, the lumber market was soft, so Bissell chose to stop harvesting before the season was done, saving trees until they could be sold at full value. Last year, the timber operation netted only about $70,000.

“If we can’t meet our guidelines, that’s fine. We know that we can always cut the trees here later,” Bissell said. “That’s one of the benefits of not having a mill to feed.

“We don’t pay taxes, and we don’t have dividends to pass out – a lot of other people don’t have the flexibility to do what we’re doing,” he said.

The park sells about 8,000 cords of lumber from the scientific management area each year. Most of the timber is sold to mills in Ashland, Dover-Foxcroft and Millinocket for lumber and paper pulp.

In 2001, the forest operations were certified as sustainable by the international Forest Stewardship Council – an honor only seven Maine harvesting operations have attained. The Baxter Scientific Forestry Management Area finally is beginning to earn the status Baxter envisioned: “a showplace for those interested in forestry.”

“We don’t try to tailor our management to provide a lesson to anyone in particular, but we put ideas on the table,” Caverly said.

Bissell presently is developing a means of sustainably harvesting small pockets of old growth. The areas, totaling fewer than 500 acres, harbor 250-year-old spruce forests and hemlock forests that are more than 450 years old.

In regions like the Pacific Northwest, where the harvest of old-growth forest prompted an international debate, knowing how to do it right will be invaluable. Old growth is a rare commodity in Maine, but Bissell takes a forester’s long-term view. Without learning how to manage an old-growth forest, park officials never will be able to rehabilitate Baxter’s wilderness acreage and maintain it in an old-growth state.

“We’re part of Baxter Park, which will eventually host hundreds of thousands of acres of [old-growth] forest,” Bissell said.

“The conundrum is that foresters never live to see if they were right or wrong.”