The first Friday of each month, the Wildling Art Museum in Los Olivos, a museum devoted to the art of America’s wilderness, screens notable films about nature or art and invites the public to come see them free of charge. The Museum also provides free popcorn and cookies, wine, water and soft drinks. Reservations are not required, but space is limited, and seats are available on a first come, first served basis.

“America’s Great Parks”

This is a 100 minute feature documentary for Discovery Channel, written by ecologist, author and filmmaker Michael Tobias, that celebrates the history, art, science and ethnography of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite.

From the end of a rope off the five-thousand foot cliff walls of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a geologist speculates –aided by visual effects- on the remarkable longevity of the canyon -1.2 billion years old – the clearest window on such antiquity anywhere in the world. A now extinct giant tarantula leaves paw prints 100 million years old in the vertical wall; and pack-rats store their middens from thousands of years ago, revealing Native American artifacts and other materials from species now extinct.

In Yellowstone, America’s first national park, we learn that nearly every 625,000 years a catastrophic volcanic eruption creates chaos, fashioning whole mountain ranges, like the Tetons, and sending gassy shockwaves across the planet. We learn the remarkable story of new catalytic enzymes in the hot pools, bacteria that have yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from medical and biological breakthroughs for the corporations that have entered into revenue-sharing partnerships with the National Park Service.

And in Yosemite, we view the elegant, dramatic life of the Southern Miwok Indians who inhabited the sacred valley; the life of the giant sequoia and the squirrels upon which they depend; and the extraordinarily volatile geological history of glaciation that has given us this remarkable valley of granite walls millions of tourists now flock to annually. Some of those tourists are climbers, including the first blind climber to ascend El Capitan, with film crews beside him. But Yosemite, as the film elaborates, is also the story of John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt and Ansel Adams.

“America’s Great Parks” was shown at the Wildling Art Museum’s administrative offices, 2948 Nojoqui Street, Suite 4.