If you didn’t know Ken Burns has been making movies for more than 30 years, after watching him in action last weekend in Telluride at the 31st annual Mountainfilm festival, you’d swear he was about 12 years old.
The guy has so much energy, so much enthusiasm. Not to mention that he was here, there and everywhere throughout the five-day event, promoting his latest documentary, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” all 12 hours of which premiered at the festival.
The film, which took six years to make, was the result of a collaboration with his old pal, writer and producer Dayton Duncan. It was also a labor of love for both men, as well as for the hundreds of people who eventually became involved — including several who were at the festival and wound up talking just as passionately about it as Burns.
When you watch the film, enjoy dynamic speaker and Yosemite National Park Ranger Shelton Johnson, as well as photographer Tuan Long, a Paris- born climber who has visited 58 national parks and taken photos in each one.
How is “National Parks”? Absolutely wonderful and truly a joy to watch. What makes it so is the fact that the six episodes, which run about two hours each, are just as much about the people who made the park system happen — or currently work in the parks, or visited the parks over the years — as they are about the parks themselves.
The whole thing is a complicated layering of images and information: footage shot by Burns’ crew, led by his longtime chief cinematographer Buddy Squires; vintage photographs gleaned from years of digging through the archives of historical societies and museums; interviews with appealing historians such as William Cronon and authors Terry Tempest Williams and Nevada Barr; striking still shots from Tuan Long.
It’s narrated primarily by Peter Coyote, but there are other easily recognizable voices as well — Tom Hanks, Sam Waterston, Carolyn McCormick, Adam Arkin. But it’s the stories of the folks who were obsessed with these magnificent protected places — from the famous, like John Muir, to the obscure, like the couple from Nebraska who visited regularly for decades — that make the viewer understand how much the parks are inextricably linked with our nation’s history.
The episodes are arranged chronologically, with the last one addressing the idea that by the 1980s, the parks were being “loved to death.” At one point, I asked Burns if travel writers should stop writing about them in order to save them.
He looked alarmed.
“No, we have to go to them more than ever before,” he said. “Yes, there’s the problem of things like garbage, but garbage can be picked up. Park attendance is going down, and there is a terrible problem of underfunding. We need people to pay attention to the parks and visit them, or we will lose them, and that is far worse than the alternative.”
We then had a conversation about how once the government starts chipping away at the national parks, taking away pieces of them, shutting down sections or using the land for other purposes, such as oil drilling or logging, we won’t get them back. They will be gone forever.
I’m going to do my part then. In fact, starting June 26, I’ll visit at least eight of the national parks of the West over two weeks, embarking on the classic Grand Circle tour. Follow along through the blog, Carrying On, where I’ll post photos and updates.
And if you happen to be visiting one of those parks and e-mail me, I’ll try to shoot your Paper Trail and post it immediately as well.
This land is your land. Let’s keep it that way.
Kyle Wagner: 303-954-1599, travel@denverpost.com,
The details
“The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” will air on PBS beginning Sept. 27. The DVD set will be available for $99.99 and a companion book will cost $50. For more information, visit
