TV REVIEW : Fresh View of Yosemite on PBS Tonight

Yosemite and the camera were made for each other. For proof, just pick up a book of Ansel Adams’ photographs. Or visit your video store, where several documentaries and travelogues on California’s star national park can be found. Despite all the visual records that have come before it, however, tonight’s edition of PBS’ wonderful “American Experience” series, “Yosemite--The Fate of Heaven,” (9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15) stakes out its own territory and comes up with a fresh view.

Unlike the picture presented by most of those tapes on Yosemite, it’s not always a pretty view. What makes “The Fate of Heaven” different is its balance--between past and present, between the beauty of nature and the threats to that beauty.

The main threat, of course, is people--the very humans who have preserved this one-of-a-kind setting and made it one of America’s great tourist draws.

With grace and wit, film maker Jon Else (who made “The Fate of Heaven” with the support of the Sundance Institute and the Yosemite Assn.) hops around between visitors and rangers and rock climbers and workers. Interspersed throughout the hour are excerpts (read by Robert Redford) from the diary of Lafayette Bunnell, a doctor who accompanied a U.S. Army brigade on a mission to the area in 1851.

While Yosemite may be perfection, Else’s film is not, though it comes close. Among the few shortcomings is failure to note that the human swarm is chiefly a summer phenomenon; the park is much less trampled upon in the early spring or late fall.

At least that final omission might help discourage more nature lovers from coming to the park--though I doubt it. Every picture of Yosemite--still or moving, blemished or not--only seems to draw more of us there.