Ken Burns turns his focus to national parks Six-part series to air on PBS in fall of 2009

It�s a perfect picture of Grinnell Lake, at least according to consummate documentarian Ken Burns. It�s a perfect picture of Grinnell Lake, at least according to consummate documentarian Ken Burns. Photo: Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Photo: Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Ken Burns turns his focus to national parks 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

It's too early for civilians. As dawn's first light falls on the jagged peaks, creeps down the dwindling glaciers and glides across glass-faced Swiftcurrent Lake, most of the tourists in the Many Glacier Hotel are still snoozing.

But down at water's edge, three early risers huddle around a camera. One of the guys, leaning on a tripod and waiting for the clouds to arrange themselves over the jagged peaks, has a Beatles haircut, the build of a shortstop and a face you've seen before somewhere.

Perhaps during pledge week.

"I want more of the color," he says, peering through a viewfinder. "OK, I'm doing it." And the film rolls.

Yes, it's Ken Burns, solemn PBS documentarian of the Civil War, jazz, baseball, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, Congress, the Brooklyn Bridge, and more than a few other American characters and institutions. Beside him stand cinematographer Buddy Squires and writer Dayton Duncan. Upstairs in the hotel, Burns' wife and 3-year-old are sleeping.

So what exactly is Burns doing on his summer vacation?

A six-part, 12-hour series, of course.

"The National Parks: America's Best Idea" is to air in autumn 2009 on PBS. This choice of topic might surprise some people, given the body counts and civil-rights gravity of some subjects Burns has chosen. His last series, nominated for several Emmy awards, covered World War II. Other projects in the pipeline depict Prohibition, the Dust Bowl and the Vietnam War - doom, destruction and gangsters on every side.

So why drag his cameras out here to the Canadian border, amid the peace, quiet, scampering children and slowly retreating glaciers?

When you boil it down, Burns says, almost all of his work is about the way American geography connects with the American character. And one of the country's most startling innovations, he says, was the creation of a national park system in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

"For the first time in human history, land was set aside not for the pleasure of kings and noblemen and the very, very rich, but for everybody, for all time," says Burns, lounging in a chair downstairs at the Many Glacier Hotel.

If that phrasing sounds suspiciously like a Burns script, that's not so surprising. Burns, the son of an anthropologist, has been exploring American institutions on film for more than 30 years, ever since his graduation from Hampshire College in Massachusetts in 1975.

Those first few years were lean - he remembers using food stamps in 1977, grossing $1,200 in 1978 while trying to woo backers for his first documentary.

"I looked 12 years old, and I was trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge," he recalls fondly. "I've got two binders of rejections at home."

Of course, he did sell the project eventually. "Brooklyn Bridge" aired on PBS in 1982, and the work has been steady, if not frenetic, ever since. Burns splits his time between tiny Walpole, N.H., and Manhattan and, at 55, still radiates boyish enthusiasm, his conversation quick and thick with literary and historical allusions.

Trail talk

Out on the trail, you don't hear a lot of hikers huffing out phrases such as "the apotheosis of our exploration" and "the portal to immortality," but Burns does. Then again, he's also sound-bite-savvy enough to sum up his life's work in three words.

"Race and space," he says. In works on the Civil War, baseball and jazz, he explored race relations in American culture. In works on the West and Lewis and Clark and Mark Twain, he explored how this country's geography and culture have shaped each other.

With the parks project, he says, he wants to explore the movement that set aside Yellowstone and Yosemite and created the national park system. These seem like astonishing, out-of-character moves, he says, "in a culture so dedicated to the almighty dollar, so dedicated to a kind of extractive and acquisitive mentality. It's phenomenal. So how did this happen? Who were these people?"

The project, written and co-produced by Burns' longtime collaborator and New Hampshire neighbor Duncan, also will look at other tensions that have long preoccupied park-watchers - the constant jostling among recreation proponents, preservationists and commercial interests, for instance, and the big businesses that shaped the system in its early decades, especially the railroad moguls and road-builders.

Things to notice

Here at Glacier, that means taking notice of Louis Hill, whose westward routing of the Great Northern Railroad helped determine the park's territory. And George Bird Grinnell, the naturalist and anthropologist who pushed for the area's designation as a national park in 1910.

And Stephen Mather, the early National Park Service director who in 1921 chose the route for Going-to-the-Sun Road, an epic 53-mile highway that crosses the Continental Divide, its higher reaches chiseled into stony slopes. It took 11 years to build the road, which opens in summer and is buried by snow the rest of the year. (Autumn snows usually close Going-to-the-Sun Road by late October or early November. This year, road-improvement work will limit access beginning Monday. For details: www.nps.gov/glac.)

Besides Swiftcurrent Lake's mountain views, the pseudo-Swiss architecture of the Many Glacier Hotel and Going-to-the-Sun Road, Glacier's attractions include Logan Pass, where you can tramp around on midsummer snowfields about 6,600 feet above sea level, a snowball's toss from the Continental Divide; and Lake McDonald Lodge, where a gallery of mounted animal heads gazes down upon the woodsy lobby.

Because so much of the parks project is in the can, Burns and his team have the rare luxury of relaxing here. Duncan has brought his wife and son. When Burns isn't chasing the good light at dawn and dusk, he and his wife, Julie Brown, take their 3-year-old daughter, Olivia, to play with pebbles on the shore, to sit for a moment on a horse at the stables near the hotel and to glide around Josephine Lake on a midday boat cruise. It's their first time here.

Fortunately for nature lovers with short attention spans, the big ideas and historical details in the Burns project will come with a hefty dose of sweet scenery. Along with the archival photography that has become a hallmark of Burns projects, the filmmakers have spent about $15 million over five years gathering fresh footage of just about all of the 58 parks. Duncan, in fact, has been to every national park but the one in American Samoa.

Burns, juggling multiple projects, has been to far fewer. But after all these years, he and the gang fall into an easy rhythm, their patter playing on footnotes in American history, lines from long-ago scripts and pratfalls from three decades of stumbling around North America in the predawn dark.

It is understood that most mornings, Burns will wake up first, Squires will be last and Duncan will turn up sometime in between, filling idle moments by fussing with his pipe, always ready to drive miles for a good slice of pie. Squires will bring his own coffeemaker and get the best pictures.

"In the material world," Squires says, "light and weather equals emotion equals storytelling. So you take advantage of what nature gives you."

"God is our gaffer," Burns says that night, scanning the dusk horizon for possibilities.

"And he's not working today," says Squires, seeing none.

A power hike

By the third afternoon in the park, the shooting is all but done. Burns grabs Squires and me and another guy for a power hike toward Grinnell Glacier. Through the loose rock and bear grass we climb, Burns leading the charge and quizzing Squires about changes in camera technology.

At about 6,000 feet, we reach a spectacular spot above Grinnell and Josephine lakes, and I pull out my camera. Burns, who has been waiting for me to catch up, can't help but sidle over.

"Now if you put these four trees in the foreground, with the lake behind," he says, "I think you can get the depth of field to work for you in a sort of Impressionistic way."

The next morning, just before he and his family head off to Lake McDonald Lodge for the last few days of this quasi-vacation, I ask Burns about his own history as a park tourist. Clearly, he has been waiting for the question.

"My family life was horrifically tragic," he begins. "There was never a moment when I wasn't aware that my mother was tremendously sick with cancer. I was told when I was 6 or 7 that she was going to die within six months. She died a few months short of my 12th birthday. I didn't have a childhood."

But one weekend when Burns was 6 or 7 and the family was living in Delaware, his father met him after school and drove young Ken to spend the night at his grandmother's house in Baltimore. The next morning before dawn, Burns' father woke him and they hopped in the car.

"We drove from Baltimore to Front Royal, Va., which is at the top of Skyline Drive, at the top of Shenandoah National Park," Burns recalls. "The Skyline Drive runs down the spine of the Shenandoah Mountains, and it is spectacular. We drove through tunnels, which I'd never done. We drove through clouds, which I'd never done. We saw deer on the road, which I had never seen. We saw a bear. We stayed in a little cabin, just my dad and me. We had a campfire. We took a hike to see a waterfall, which I had never seen. We turned over logs and saw these bright orange salamanders. And they scampered away, and I caught one.

"And I will never forget the thrill of it. ... It isn't just these places. It's who you see them with."