Sunset at Webster Lake in Baxter State Park.
(Courtesy of Kevin Osborne)
The other side of Baxter
By Andrew Kekacs
It is, quite literally, the other side of Baxter.
Tucked in the northwest corner of Baxter State Park are almost 46 square miles of woodland that Percival P. Baxter, the ardent conservationist who donated Mount Katahdin to the people of Maine, set aside for "scientific forest management."
Most visitors are aware that Baxter's gifts of more than 200,000 acres around Katahdin came with strict conditions that the land "forever be kept and remain in the natural wild state ... [so that] Katahdin in all its glory forever shall remain the mountain of the people of Maine."
Yet there is another side of Baxter -- both the man and the park. As a former governor of Maine, he understood that the state's vast woodlands have always been its greatest natural resource. He believed the future of Maine was tied to the health of its forests, and he sought to set aside a place where the very best forestry could be practiced.
"In my travels in foreign lands I have seen beautiful great forests that for centuries have been producing a crop of wood without depletion," Baxter wrote to then-Gov. Edmund Muskie and the Maine Legislature in 1955. "... I want this township to become a showplace for those interested in forestry, a place where a continuing timber crop can be cultivated, harvested and sold; where reforestation and scientific cutting will be employed; an example and an inspiration to others. What is done in our forests today will help or harm the generations who follow us."
As late as the mid-1980s, it was unclear whether Baxter's vision for the Scientific Forest Management Area would be achieved. In the wake of allegations about poor cutting practices and faced with a lawsuit by environmentalists, the Baxter Park Authority halted all harvesting in the SFMA. Members of the authority, which oversees the park, agreed to hire a resource manager to craft a new plan for managing the timberland. They also named an advisory committee -- including some of their sharpest critics -- to offer input on future harvesting.
Even so, there was despair that the SFMA would live up to the former governor's hopes. "Personally, I would like to see the Authority sit back and take a long hard look at the present and future of this area -- will we ever be able to make it into a showplace?" wrote an unidentified park employee in a 1986 memo.
In late 1986, however, the park hired forester Jensen Bissell to serve as its first resource manager. Over the next two decades, Bissell transformed the SFMA into both a showplace of forest management and a reliable source of revenue to support park operations. Bissell's widely acclaimed success was a key factor in his promotion to park director in December 2005.
Bissell was succeeded by forester Carol Redelsheimer, who is just completing her first year on the job. Redelsheimer says she was thrilled to take on the challenge of implementing Baxter's vision of "scientific forest management."
"It's a dream job," she says.
Dean Slauenwhite brings logs to the roadside.
During a recent September day in the SFMA, Redelsheimer stopped at an active harvest site, where a crew from Pelletier Bros. Forest Products is working. Clint Morrow of Millinocket is operating a $500,000 processor that reaches into the woods to sever trees from their roots, removes the limbs, cuts the logs to length and piles them near the side of the trail. Dean Slauenwhite of Dyer Brook then loads the wood into his forwarder and takes it to the log yard, where it is sorted and held until trucked to sawmills or pulp mills.
"They get a lot of credit for what happens here," says Redelsheimer. "It's important that our crews care about these woods, and have a sense of ownership in them."
The work proceeds quickly and efficiently, with Morrow gracefully maneuvering the track-driven processor and its large boom through the stand, selecting poor-quality or lower-value trees and leaving the best behind.
"Good or bad, the impact we'll have on this forest in 100 years will be profound," says Redelsheimer. "Research has shown that the forest is more than just trees ... we try to incorporate that into our management. We try to manage according to the way nature would do it."
The goal in much of the SFMA is to grow trees for more than a century, although most of the stands will see some kind of harvesting every 20 years. The most valuable trees are always left behind, whether that value is financial (for sale to mills) or biological (as wildlife habitat or to preserve a diversity of trees and other species across the landscape).
While a substantial portion of the SFMA has a history of harvesting or past fires, there are also small stands of very old trees, including some places that have never been harvested. In the Frost Pond Forest in 2004, for example, there were a few very old red spruce trees being killed by a beetle infestation. Bissell was faced with a difficult choice: Let the trees die to mimic natural forces in the forest, or harvest them for the exceptionally valuable "tonewood" they might produce. Tonewood is used by instrument makers for the tops of the finest guitars and other stringed instruments.
In the end, the park decided to harvest only those trees that were facing imminent death. The resulting auction of the logs caught the attention of several high-end luthiers. There are no plans to harvest more wood from the Frost Pond Forest, but a guitar maker from Indiana visited the park last winter and bought five spruce logs that were felled in the normal course of harvesting in other areas.
A wary coyote in the park's Scientific Forest
Management Area.
That's the kind of unusual opportunity that can arise in a place like the SFMA, where the land will be owned by the people of Maine forever. Throughout the area, Redelsheimer is thinking a century or more into the future.
You can't really manage for old growth, she says, because it is by definition unmanaged. But it's possible to incorporate areas with "very late successional characteristics" -- very old trees and the other species found around them -- into the management plan.
"While we have an area of about 200 acres [the Frost Pond Forest] that we are managing for very late successional characteristics, we try to keep elements of [old growth] in all of our stands."
In addition to growing trees longer than usual, the SFMA will typically keep a larger volume of trees per acre. Managing light is a key concern of foresters; Redelsheimer can favor desirable red spruce seedlings -- which grow well in shady areas -- by keeping a relatively dense growth of trees above them.
Diversity, too, is important. Loggers leave dead or dying trees behind for wildlife, keep older "legacy" trees, and retain less-common sugar maple, hemlock and yellow birch.
It's all part of "scientific forest management," which Bissell and Redelsheimer say is just the practical application of knowledge provided by the biological, physical and social sciences.
There is little question now that the management of the SFMA is achieving Baxter's goals. The area is certified as well-managed by the Forest Stewardship Council in 2001, and was named a "Model Forest" by The Forest Guild.
Though it is less-visited than other areas in the park, the "other side of Baxter" is yet another example of the vision of Maine's most celebrated benefactor.