It is too early for civilians. As dawn's first light falls on the jagged peaks, creeps down the dwindling glaciers and glides across the 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 colour,'' he says, peering through a viewfinder. “OK, I'm doing it,'' he says. 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. In the hotel, Burns's wife and 3-year-old baby are sleeping.
Work at play
So what exactly is Ken 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 the Second World War.
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 to the Canadian border, amid the peace and quiet?
When you boil it down, Burns says, almost all his works are 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.
“For the first time in human history, land was set aside not for the pleasure of kings, noblemen and the rich but for everybody, for all time,'' says Burns, lounging in a chair downstairs at the hotel.
Essentially Burns
If that phrasing sounds like a Burns script, that's not 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, grossing $1,200 (Dh4,408) while trying to woo backers for his first documentary.
Of course, he did sell the project eventually. Brooklyn Bridge was aired on PBS in 1982 and the work has been steady ever since.
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 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?''
Looking ahead
The project, written and co-produced by Burns's longtime collaborator and New Hampshire neighbour Duncan, will look at other tensions that have long preoccupied park-watchers — the constant jostling among recreation proponents, preservationists and commercial interests and the big businesses that shaped the system in its early decades, especially the railroad moguls and road-builders.
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.
Relaxing
Because so much of the parks project is in the can, Burns and his team have the rare luxury of relaxing. 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 is understood that most mornings Burns will wake up first, Squires will be last and Duncan will turn up sometime in between. Squires will bring his own coffee maker and get the best pictures.
By the third afternoon in the park, the shooting is all but done. Burns grabs Squires and me and another guy for a hike towards Grinnell Glacier.
At about 6,000 feet, we reach a spectacular spot above Grinnell and Josephine lakes and I pull out my camera.
Burns can't help but sidle over. The next morning, just before he and his family head off to Lake McDonald Lodge for the last few days of this quasi-vacation, Burns said: “It isn't just these places. It's who you see them with.''
With scent of sweet scenery
Fortunately for nature lovers with short attention spans, the big ideas and historical details in Burns's 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 (Dh55 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 many 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 yesteryear scripts and pratfalls from three decades of stumbling around North America in the predawn dark.
Summing up
Burns splits his time between tiny Walpole, New Hampshire and Manhattan. At 55, he still radiates a boyish enthusiasm, his conversation quick and thick with literary and historical allusions.
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.
He's also soundbite-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 other works, he explored how this country's geography and culture have shaped each other.
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