BAXTER STATE PARK – The Maine tradition of freezing in the new year’s cold to earn a reservation to camp at the “people’s park” during the fleeting summertime is no more.

Jan. 2, 2004, will be Baxter State Park’s last Opening Day.

Members of the Baxter State Park Authority voted unanimously during a Friday meeting at Kidney Pond to implement a new rolling reservation system beginning in January 2005.

Rolling reservations, which are taken over time as opposed to all at once, are just more fair, said Paul Labbe of Scarborough, who led a citizen advisory group that proposed the new system.

Under the current system, to get a popular site at a particularly desirable time, like the Fourth of July or Father’s Day weekend, required lining up before dawn on Opening Day.

For many people, taking that day off from work to get a reservation just hasn’t been possible. Out-of-state campers have complained that the distance to Millinocket is discriminatory.

Under the new system, reservations will be made no more than four months in advance. For example, if you want to camp at Chimney Pond on July 15, the reservation can’t be made before April 15. If the date four months earlier falls on a holiday or a weekend, park staff will start accepting reservations on the next business day.

The park will hold a scaled-down opening day on Jan. 18, 2005, for the sake of tradition, Labbe said.

Reservations for any date will be taken on Jan. 18, but, in the interest of fairness, the park will likely limit the total number of campsites and cabins granted on that single day. The percentage of sites that will be available in 2005 will be determined by information collected during the 2004 opening day.

“Opening day will, in fact, be [just] an opening day, rather than opening the floodgates for the whole month,” Labbe said. “What I’m hoping is that as people see how this works, they won’t feel the need to run to Millinocket and stand in line that first day to get what they want.”

The authority – composed of Attorney General Steven Rowe, Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Commissioner Roland “Dan” Martin, and Maine Forest Service Chief Alec Giffen – is responsible for all policymaking in Baxter State Park.

For more than a year, the park staff has been seeking relief from the overwhelming work of Opening Day. In recent years, four people have been responsible for making thousands of reservations during the first week of January.

“The reservation office has gotten to the point where it’s extremely stressful,” said Park Director Irvin “Buzz” Caverly, who answers to the authority and manages day-to-day operations at the park.

“Frankly, I’m surprised we haven’t had a nervous breakdown out there,” he said Friday.

In past years, because they deal with walk-in reservations first, park staff didn’t even get around to opening reservations that come by mail until the third week of January because of the opening week crowds at Park Headquarters.

Under the new system, reservations that are mailed to park headquarters will only be accepted if they arrive within a week of the day that people could walk into the office to make the same reservation.

Early letters will be mailed back to their senders, and timely letters will be opened on the morning that the park starts taking reservations for the desired date.

“The mail adds a tremendous amount of equality to this,” Labbe said. “You can be competing equally for the desired spot.”

Finally, telephone reservations will be taken only in the ten days just before a camping trip, but callers will take their chances on any sites being left available.

The authority considered accepting telephone reservations earlier and adding an Internet reservation system, but decided to establish the rolling reservations before tackling technology issues.

While the advisory group discussed giving Mainers or repeat visitors an advantage when seeking reservations, no such provisions were included in the final proposal presented to the authority.

For now, park staff will concentrate on educating the public about the new system. Already, people are wondering if the change will backfire and result in even more people showing up on Jan. 18, 2005, because they don’t understand the new system.

But the public seems open to change. Last January, a new policy limiting campers to two reservations per person per day was very well-received, and made the whole process move much more smoothly, Caverly said.

“The whole point of doing this 14 months ahead of time is to get the word out there,” Rowe said. “This is a trial. If it doesn’t work, we’ll probably scrap it and try something new.”