Ken Burns presents “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”

Watch the whole series online or on the PBS Video app.
Airs Wednesdays at 2:30 p.m., beginning Sept 22
Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature’s most spectacular locales — from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska — the series is filled with incidents and characters as gripping and fascinating as American history has to offer.

Filmmakers Burns and Dayton Duncan vividly reveal behind-the-scenes stories about the making of the series, while engaging interviews with Park Ranger Shelton Johnson and cinematographer Buddy Squires provide additional background.

“The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” is also a story of the unforgettable Americans who made them possible. People from every conceivable background — rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs — devoted themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in so doing reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy.