WATERVILLE – The Baxter State Park experience might be enhanced if a buffer were developed around its boundaries, Dean Bennett, noted wilderness writer and University of Maine at Farmington professor, said Saturday.

Bennett, addressing the annual meeting of the Friends of Baxter State Park at Governor’s Restaurant, applauded the purchase last year of a 24,000-acre township adjacent to the 200,000-acre park by Roxanne Quimby. Similar purchases, which limit logging and development, would benefit the park, he said.

A measure of how large a buffer is needed, Bennett suggested, is the distance that a slamming car door can be heard. He recommended a zone surrounding the park in which motorized vehicles are banned, and then surrounding that zone, a protected district in which motorized vehicles are permitted.

“I think you have to think in terms of sound,” he said. When asked how wide the buffer should be, Bennett said, “Ideally, a township,” like that purchased by Quimby.

Ken Spalding, a member of the Friends board of directors, responded to Bennett’s recommendation, arguing that a better measure of the sound buffer needed is the distance at which chain saws, feller-buncher harvesting machines, and log trucks shifting gears can be heard.

On the same theme, Holly Dominie, outgoing Friends president, said the group wants to sharpen its focus in coming years to protect what is important about the park.

“We see pressures are mounting and would like to urge the park [managers] to think in a holistic way, in a long-term way,” she said, “to ensure the wilderness values are preserved.”

Bennett said he asked longtime park Director Buzz Caverly to identify potential threats to the park. They are:

. Aircraft noise, particularly low-flying sightseeing and wildlife observation flights;

. Introduction of invasive plants such as milfoil and loosestrife;

. Air pollution such as acid rain and smog;

. Radio antennas, solar power panels, communication devices and other technology that has affected the park’s primitive nature.

Dominie reported that the Friends plan to develop positions on some of the pressing concerns faced by the park with a new policy and issues committee.

In his “state of the park” report, Caverly told the group about the park’s steady removal of old, obsolete buildings, which are being replaced with fewer, but higher-quality structures. The move is part of a policy that values wilderness over development and moves the park to a “wilder within” status.

Caverly defended that policy against the criticism of Friends member George Kerivan of Harvard, Mass., who called the demolished buildings historic, “one-of-a-kind cabins.” Caverly said the park’s mandate was to preserve and protect the natural features of Baxter.

“We’re not going to preserve buildings,” he said. “We’re going to manage that park for wilderness.”

Caverly also noted that total use of the park dropped in 2003. With increasing gas prices expected this summer, he speculated that visits may drop again.

In 2003, 64,715 entered the park from its various gates. Of those, 36,027 were Maine residents, and 28,688 were nonresidents, he said.

By using a bulldozer to scrape away snow on the park road from Togue Pond to Kidney Pond, he said, the park should be accessible by the traditional opening on May 15. Snowmobile use on roads has packed snow so it is slow to melt in the early spring without using the bulldozer, Caverly said.