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.

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, now thrive in places such as Yellowstone, Glacier and Grand Teton national parks.

Yellowstone 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 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.

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 President 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 watched 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.

"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.

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.

Filmed over six years, Burns claims it has the best footage yet produced by his longtime collaborator and 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 boat trip into Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park.

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."

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.

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 multiday 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."

On TV

* What: The National Parks: America's Best Idea, the latest Ken Burns documentary

* When, where: The 12-hour, six-part series is set to air in September.

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