One good Yosemite tale

The first episode of the long-awaited National Parks documentary from Ken Burns premiered tonight on PBS featuring, almost exclusively, two parks: Yosemite and Yellowstone.

Watching it reaffirmed what I've known for a while: that I really need to go see Yosemite. Visiting Yellowstone with my family a few years ago was life-changing. I hear Yosemite can have the same effect.

So now I'm going hunting for Yosemite placecasts, and the first thing I ran across was a nice bit of audio storytelling from the National Parks Conservation Association. In 2007 and 2008, it produced a well-done series of podcasts about parks across the country. The first episode was about Buffalo Soldiers in Yosemite. Apparently, while the park was under state jurisdiction (before it became a national park), a regiment of african-american soldiers guarded the area from locals who weren't happy about the land being so stringently protected. I have a feeling this tension will be a theme of the whole Ken Burns series.

In fact, the ranger featured in this podcast, Shelton Johnson is also quoted extensively in the PBS series. He dresses up as a Buffalo Soldier and surprises visitors with the stories of what the park was like "back then" and with the fact that African-Americans were involved in the early history of this place. At one point, Johnson says that African-American visitors find this bit of living history especially welcoming in a place where they didn't expect to see many other non-white visitors.

(That was a point I hadn't really thought about before this week, when I was interviewing the superintendent of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. I'm working on a radio story about school kids taking canoe trips down the river in St. Paul and one of the things that Superintendent Paul Labovitz told me is that the visitors to his park are much more diverse than other parks...mostly by virtue of proximity to an urban area. He said the park service is aware of who is visiting its parks and wants to make them more appealing and welcoming to all groups.)

I don't know why NPCA stopped making it's Park Stories podcast after only a handful of episodes, but I wish it would start again. They were good introductions to various parks without trying to be exhaustive overviews. Instead, they highlighted one particular story in each place. I know there are thousands more stories just as interesting that need to be told. Audio is a great -- and relatively easy -- way to tell those stories.




(photo from NPCA by Jim Williams)