Alaskan sojourn retraced

Alaska’s coast has a seemingly endless array of fjords and bays teeming with natural beauty. Therein lies a danger for the smitten explorer who ventures too close to, say, a 10-story-tall glacier wall that might collapse without warning.

For a documentary maker’s art, it can be perilous as well: How do you capture the majesty, ruination and rebuilding of an ecosystem and a culture in just under two hours? So it is that “The Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced,” premiering on KCET tonight at 8, valiantly attempts to look at how the region has changed over a century. The results are mixed.

At its heart, the film tells the story of two expeditions along the Alaskan coast: an 1899 trip led by railroad magnate Edward Harriman, who assembled a Who’s Who of naturalists on board his ship, and the 2001 retracing of that voyage by a group of scholars.

After being told by his doctor to relax more, Harriman set out for Alaska with 25 artists, writers and scientists in fields ranging from botany to geology to zoology. Among his crew were John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club; naturalist writer John Burroughs; George Bird Grinnell, a founder of the National Audubon Society; and photographer Edward Curtis, who would become famous for his pictures of Native Americans.

On their 9,000-mile journey over two months, the scientists collected more than 100 trunks of specimens, and the artists made more than 5,000 photos and paintings. Much to the consternation of Muir, Harriman was also determined to hunt, bagging a mother bear and her cub along the way.

Roughly a century later, professor Thomas Litwin of Smith College in Massachusetts organized a new expedition, revisiting the route with a cadre of scholars, albeit using modern technology. Their goal was to observe the changes since Harriman’s day. What they found was a mixture of bad and good, as explained in the film’s numerous “sidebars” by the various experts in history, ecology, economics, culture and so on.

The combination of all these storytelling strands demands that viewers pay close attention. Even then, it’s easy to get lost in the details, by focusing on the beautiful photography or being swept along by the film’s languid pace. It’s both a testament to and a criticism of filmmakers Lawrence Hott and Diane Garey that you really need to see it more than once to understand the full import of what’s on screen.