Wolf researcher Rick McIntrye and filmmaker Ken Burns are shown in Yellowstone National Park’s Lamar Valley earlier this year.

Tacoma, Wash. ? Ken Burns has gained fame as one of America’s best documentary filmmakers with works such as “The Civil War” and “Baseball,” the two most-watched series ever on public television.

Now, it’s the national parks that are the focus of Burns and longtime collaborator Dayton Duncan.

“The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” is a six-part, 12-hour series that delves into the history of the nation’s parks, the people who fostered the idea of the parks and the people who have worked to maintain these places of remarkable natural beauty and important historic significance.

It is scheduled to air on PBS starting Sept. 27.

During the 10 years they’ve worked on the project, Burns and Duncan reaffirmed their belief that national parks are about personal connections — to nature, to spirituality, to history, to family.

“This is a story of ideas and individuals. This is not a travelogue, not a nature film,” Burns said. “The story of the national parks is a story of people.”

The best friends have collaborated on “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “Lewis and Clark” and “The War.” On this project, they realized everyone remembers the moment they made their own connection to national parks.

Burns said it was a trip to Yosemite National Park during the filming for the documentary that stirred a long-dormant memory. There, he recalled a trip he and his father took to Shenandoah National Park when Burns was just 6.

“My mom was dying, it was the only time we had gone out on a father-son event like that. I hadn’t forgotten it, but it was just lost,” he said of the trip to Shenandoah. “Now, in Yosemite, I had this sense of reawakening.”

For Duncan, it was a family road trip that took him to some of the iconic parks in the West the Badlands, Devil’s Tower, Little Bighorn, Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

“For a kid from a small town in the rolling hills of Iowa, to see the eroded landscape of the Badlands, to see the incredible scarred column at Devil’s Tower, and the wonder of Yellowstone, the beauty of the Tetons, it was like a whole new world opened to me,” Duncan said.

But it wasn’t until he took his own family to Jenny Lake at Grand Teton National Park that he realized how deep the memories ran.

“I remember my mom getting misty-eyed every time we mentioned Jenny Lake. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. National parks are one of the rare places you can store a memory and it is still there when you come back. I can take my children to Jenny Lake and say your grandmother loved this place and it looks exactly the same.”

That sense of connection was reinforced as the pair interviewed more than 50 people for the film.

“All of them described their moment of transformation,” Burns said.

“Parks make you feel connected on so many levels. There also are these rituals of return to families. The parks are connected to literally millions of Americans,” he said.

We also talked about how their film would help the National Park Service reach out to new Americans and people who have yet to have that “wow moment.”

“There are segments of people who don’t feel a sense of ownership yet,” Burns said. “But it’s people of every color who have made the parks what they are today. We have a hero that looks and sounds like you.”

Duncan cited as examples the Buffalo Soldiers, the black cavalry troops who patrolled Yosemite and Sequoia national parks, and George Melendez Wright, a Hispanic park ranger in San Francisco who pushed the service to protect the wildlife and not just the views.

The part of the film that looks at Mount Rainier tells the story of Seattle residents Iwao Matsushita and his wife, Hanaye, who took photos and kept journals to document their trips to the park in the 1920s and 1930s, only to be sent to internment camps at the start of World War II.

“People of every race and background have been involved in the creation of the parks,” Duncan said.

“The national parks are the application of the Declaration of Independence to the landscape,” he said. “You own these parks by virtue of being an American.”