Ken Burns brings national parks to your living room

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. -- Before the national forests were designated, before the interstates were even a glimmer in the mind's eye, Congress started making national parks.

Their creation, Ken Burns relates in his latest blockbuster documentary, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," was a triumph of democracy. It secured forever and for everyone some of the continent's natural jewels -- Yellowstone's otherworldly geysers, Yosemite's granite towers, the Grand Canyon's endless depths.

And as the nation and its ethic evolved, so has the park system. It now has sites marking Indian massacres carried out by soldiers under the same government that designated the first parks. Large predators such as wolves and grizzly bears, once trapped and shot to near-extermination across the nation, now thrive in places such as Yellowstone, Glacier and Grand Teton national parks.

Yellowstone, in northwestern Wyoming, became the first national park in 1872. On a recent trip into the park's Lamar Valley, Burns and his co-producer, Dayton Duncan, laugh with delight as they see a red fox arc skyward and plunge snout first into two feet of snow in search of a mouse.

"That was just fantastic!" Burns exclaims.

But like Burns' prior epic works for PBS -- Civil War, baseball, jazz -- his latest documentary looks beyond the park system's immense acreage and impressive beasts to grab at its quintessential American themes.

There are the big thinkers, John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, who dove into America's wilds and came out with the idea that dams shouldn't go everywhere and not every animal should be shot.

There are the shadowy corporate interests of the railroads, whose lobbyists pushed the parks' creation so they could then solicit passengers keen to see these wonders of the world.

There is race, including regiments of the U.S. Army's black "Buffalo Soldiers" who kept watch for poachers and timber thieves at Yosemite and Sequoia national parks at the turn of the 19th century.

And there is religion.

"Europe had the cathedrals. What did we have?" Burns asks during a conversation near Yellowstone's Mammoth Hot Springs, where lava-heated water bubbles into green, blue and orange mineral pools stacked like a towering wedding cake.

"These are our temples. You can feel the ecstatic expansiveness Yellowstone provides. ... This is still the memory of creation."

In the century-and-a-half since Yellowstone's formation, the National Park system has grown to 58 parks. There are another 333 historic sites, monuments, preserves, memorials and recreation areas.

Delaware is the one state without a Park Service site.

Burns' 12-hour, six-part television series is due to air in September. It cost $15 million to produce, a record for the filmmaker.

Leading the production was Duncan, Burns' partner, friend and neighbor in Walpole, N.H. Though Burns' moniker will mark the film, it was Duncan who visited every park while Burns juggled pending projects addressing Prohibition, the Dust Bowl, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, the Vietnam War and the Central Park jogger case.

Filmed over six years, Burns claims it has the best footage yet produced by his longtime collaborator, chief cinematographer Buddy Squires.

Dawn and dusk offered the best light, making for long days of filming. Some shots required horse-packing excursions into the Sierra Nevada. There was also a four-day boat trip into Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park.

But more often the best shots came from places like Yosemite's Inspiration Point -- right there on the roadside, marked with a sign and complete with parking lot. During the shooting of some scenes, hundreds of tourists milled about just outside the camera's frame as Burns' crew captured the park system's most iconic images.

Duncan conceived the idea for the series during a 1998 trip to Yellowstone and other Western parks with his family. That trip mirrored a cross-country tour Duncan took as a youth, when he was 9 and helped plot a course that took the family through Yellowstone.

The parks, Duncan says now, are as much destination as idea, an imaginative piece of the national psyche that passes through generations.

"This place is the same as when you were 9 years old and when your parents were 9 years old," he says. "This large concept of the parks collapses into a very personal moment."

Burns jumps in to add: "That's your immortality right there."

The PBS series spans the mid-1800s to the 1980s, seeking in part to highlight the timeless pressures the parks face.

Just as some critics today bemoan the National Park Service's $2.6 billion budget as insufficient to keep up with 300 million annual visitors, so did the first advocates of Yellowstone complain that Congress offered not a single cent to support the park's creation.

Then there is the perpetual struggle to carve public space out of a landscape many would like to see used for private profit.

When Yellowstone was created, for example, lobbyists for the Northern Pacific Railway stressed the unsuitability of its 2 million acres. They argued it was too cold to grow anything, too rocky for livestock and lacking in any minerals worth mining. Only then did Congress pass the bill creating the park.

Despite an outspoken advocacy for shielding parks from development, Duncan and Burns see no contradiction in the daily human encroachment into these natural enclaves. Burns says that includes the summer "wildlife jams" in Yellowstone where cars stack up and their occupants exit to crowd around a moose or a bighorn sheep.

The park experience, he contends, accrues to each visitor uniquely. It doesn't matter whether a park's features are viewed while cruising in air-conditioned comfort along Virginia's Blue Ridge Parkway, or soaked in aboard a raft floating down the Colorado River on a multi-day trip through the Grand Canyon.

Both, he says, are valid -- and equally American -- manifestations of the National Park experience.

"This is a history -- not a travelogue," he says. "In these great national wonders such as Yellowstone, we feel insignificant. And yet paradoxically we are made to feel larger."

The filmmaker's latest trip to Yellowstone came in late January. He had visited several times during the summer, but knew through Duncan that tourists are fewest in winter. That's also when heavy snowfalls drive wolves, elk and bison out of the mountains and into Yellowstone's more hospitable river valleys.

On a guided tour into the Lamar Valley, Burns, Duncan and Duncan's 18-year-old son, Will, marvel at a huge bull bison using his massive head to shovel snow aside so he can reach the grass beneath. They observe a sparrow-size American Dipper -- the continent's only aquatic songbird -- disappear into an icy stream for long stretches before popping to the surface.

And they watch wolves, a pack of a dozen pups and adults, circling the edge of a bison herd on the lookout for winter-weakened prey. Using a powerful spotting scope, Burns sees the animals crane their necks skyward seconds before their howls spill across the valley floor.

"Here it comes," Burns says, raising a hand for quiet just before the sound reaches their ears.

The filmmaker lets out his own howl in response, then offers a quote from one of the characters in his series: "Now let me die, because I am happy."