NEW YORK.-When he died in 1984, Adams was revered as an artist and environmentalist, his images of his favorite Western wild places engraved upon the national consciousness. His path to success was sometimes as steep as the mountain trails he negotiated with his camera. That path, and the unusual man who blazed it, are revealed in Ric Burns’s fascinating film ’Ansel Adams,’ tonight’s installment of ’American Experience’ on PBS. The film offers a portrait of a less-than-perfect man who left a portfolio of nearly perfect photographs, images that helped generations of his countrymen feel a connection to the vanishing wilderness. Through its mixture of vintage photos and movies and breathtaking new scenes of Adams’s California, the documentary captures the region’s magic grandeur, which seduced him as a 12-year-old and never let go.