Kevin Costner is reflecting on his own national park experience in honor of his upcoming documentary Yellowstone to Yosemite. That documentary series is a sequel to Yellowstone: One-Fifty. It features Costner exploring the history of Yellowstone and Yosemite.
In a clip from FOX Nation, Costner reflected on the first time he visited Yosemite National Park as well as Sequoia National Park. The actor said that he was just a kid at the time and was amazed by how big everything was.
He said, "My first park was the Sequoia, where trees were as large as the famous picture shows that a car can drive through it. And I myself was little. And if you could think back in your own life, when you remember your bedroom or your backyard being huge, and you go back to it as an adult, and, of course, it's very, very small."
He continued, "As a small child, I thought to myself, my God, this is the biggest thing maybe I have ever seen in my life, so big that even a car can drive through it. I was lucky. Do you realize that? I was lucky that someone had made a decision along the way to protect this."
Kevin Costner Talks National Park
Costner was thankful for people like Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir for protecting these natural wonders.
He explained, "Otherwise, it had been gone. And my whole essence of how I have lived my life was formed from being in these wild places. And these wild places needed protection. They're like a patient that can't speak for itself. Someone had to speak for it. John Muir had to speak for it. Ferdinand Hayden had to speak for it. Teddy Roosevelt had to stand for it."
As far as Yosemite, he described going to the national park as stepping into Wonderland. He had a similar epiphany as Alice in the classic book.
He said, "Then I remember coming to Yosemite. And there was something about Yosemite that, when you first arrived to it, you come around a corner or you come through a tunnel. I can't even remember, but I remember, if Alice looked through the looking glass, I came through a tunnel and saw maybe the most beautiful place I have ever seen in my life, this valley of stone surrounding it, protecting it, this rush of water that looked like it was just hurling out of the mountain."
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The first episode of Yellowstone to Yosemite premieres on Fox Nation on February 8.
