LAKE PLACID -- A new PBS documentary will broadcast the Adirondack landscape across America on Wednesday.

The two-hour film "The Adirondacks," shot airborne over rugged mountaintops, up winding rivers and on the ground from ice-covered lakes and misty forest trails, looks as much to Adirondack people for meaning as to wilderness points of view.

Filmmakers said they worked to capture a sense of place in the rural pace preserved in the only public/private wilderness park in North America.

"We had a year. We stayed all over," filmmaker and executive producer Tom Simon said in a phone interview from his Dobbs Ferry studio.

"I think we did pretty well. We had a fairly open brief in terms of what kind of film to make."

LONG TIME COMING

The "brief" really began over four years ago when Buffalo-based WNED looked to produce nationally, said John Grant, chief program officer.

"We're just growing our way into being a producer. We looked around and asked, what can we focus on?"

WNED's inaugural documentary on Niagara Falls led them to another state treasure: the Adirondack Park.

Grant approached Simon, an executive producer of "National Geographic Specials" on PBS and for "National Geographic Explorer" on TBS.

Simon won seven Emmy Awards for his individual work, more than three-dozen Emmys for films he's produced and 150-plus awards in journalism.

In researching the Adirondack Park, Simon was smitten.

He had been here once before as a child on a family trip to Lake Placid.

"The first interview we did was with Clarence Petty," Simon said.

The legendary Adirondack forester and progenitor of the Adirondack State Land Master Plan was 101 that year.