Those are bland words to describe a journey that was anything but. The money, which Congress approved, launched the Lewis and Clark expedition on a voyage of discovery unparalleled in American history.

Members of the expedition were the first American citizens to see the Rocky Mountains and to cross the Continental Divide. They were the first to reach the Pacific Ocean by land. They were the first representatives of the United States to make contact with 11 of the 14 native tribes living along the upper Missouri.

They were the first to finally destroy the cherished fantasy of a Northwest Passage, the easily navigable water route across the continent that had preoccupied explorers and traders for centuries. They were the first to describe 178 species of plants new to science, as well as 122 species and subspecies of animals. (So little was known about the west that President Jefferson had advised other potential explorers to keep a sharp eye out for woolly mammoths and for red-haired, blue-eyed, Welsh-speaking Indians.)

Members of the Corps of Discovery also were the last to see and describe the interior West before it began undergoing radical change at the hands of traders, trappers, commercial hunters, settlers, miners, loggers, ranchers and the military forces assigned to protect them. In the explorers' wake and along their route, its topography and natural resources so precisely described, came a string of forts, then steamboats, railroads and eventually interstate highways.

Photo courtesy of American Philosophical Society The explorers' journals are preserved at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

The expedition's report on the vast territory acquired through the Louisiana Purchase (a deal with France that, at the bargain price of 3 cents an acre, instantly doubled the size of the United States) transformed the unknown into the known and helped unleash the great westward migration that would forever change - and in many ways would come to define - the nation. Their journals also serve as a benchmark against which to measure those changes in the physical landscape, its flora and its fauna, and its indigenous inhabitants. They provide a snapshot of the West at the last moment before the rush of white settlement began to alter it forever.

The three-year celebration of the expedition's bicentennial will begin hundreds of miles from this city on the Mississippi, but it was here on the edge of the Great Plains - and on the muscular back of this great river - that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark truly began their journey across terra incognita and into history. For it is here that the United States ended and the unknown West began in 1803, and it is here that members of the expedition had their last real taste of civilization before departing. It is here, as well, that they rejoined civilization upon their return from the wilderness.

And so it is here, beneath the soaring Gateway Arch at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, that this series of stories begins.

I spent three months last year retracing the journey of the Corps of Discovery, which laboriously ascended the Missouri River by boat through modern-day Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana, crossed the Continental Divide on foot and horseback in Idaho, and followed the Columbia River and its tributaries in dugout canoes through Washington and Oregon to the Pacific Coast. Before the journey began, I spent additional months drawing up the itinerary, consulting maps, arranging interviews, and reading every book and article about the expedition I could get my hands on - a collection of material that now fills a bookshelf and a file drawer. I then packed up my truck, strapped a mountain bike and kayak to the roof, and drove, paddled, pedaled and walked nearly 16,000 miles through 23 states.

Along the way, I enjoyed all the meteorological variety the West can offer: violent thunderstorms, sleet, snow, fog, rain and hot, cloudless days when the sky over the prairies was like a hammered sheet of white-hot metal. I encountered bison, elk, eagles, prairie dogs, bighorn sheep and spawning salmon; toured Indian reservations, forts, museums and fish hatcheries; endured mosquitoes, ticks, jet skis and biting flies. I slept in a teepee, in countless motel beds, on a boat in a lake, in a sleeping bag under the frigid night sky of a North Dakota winter.

I took my meals in tribal casinos, an earth lodge, fancy restaurants and dismal diners, at windblown highway rest stops, on river banks and sand bars, and in a rain-pelted tent. I spent time with biologists, bartenders, river guides, history buffs, musicians, ranchers, and members of some of the tribes - Lakota, Nez Perce, Mandan, Hidatsa, Yakama - the expedition encountered, and whose part of the Lewis and Clark story seldom has been told.

I learned to make fire with flint and steel, figured out how to operate the stern sweep on a small open boat known as a pirogue, became proficient at the laconic Montana wave - one hand draped casually over the top of the steering wheel, the palm flipped upward at each oncoming driver - which tempers the tedium of those long, lonely highways with moments of casual civility.

Over the next 12 months, leading up to the bicentennial's kickoff next January, you and I will retrace the route followed by Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the changing cast of characters who accompanied them on their 8,000-mile trek to the Pacific and back. We'll meet those characters, as well as some of the men and women now making their living in the lands the explorers first described to America.

The monthly series of stories will describe my journey, and will compare those experiences with the explorers' adventures on the same path 200 years ago. But the series is intended to be more than mere travelogue, more than a recitation of historical facts most Americans learned in elementary school. It will also focus on the nature of the region through which the expedition's trail passes, examining the many ways it has changed - and continues to change - since that initial exploration.

When I set out, I hoped to answer a few deceptively simple questions. What is it like on the trail today? What was it like 200 years ago? How has the West evolved - ecologically, socially, politically - since Lewis and Clark explored it? What can we learn about that region, and about the United States itself, by examining it from the unique perspective provided by the explorers' journals, letters and artifacts?
As a native of the West, who loves the landscape and has always been fascinated by its history, I also hoped for the adventure of a lifetime. I found it.

Our national epic

Staff photo by John Krist Rugged terrain in the Bitteroot Mountains between Montan and Idaho posed a formidible challenge to members of the expedition. Mondern-day travelers can retrace the route on a narrow, extremely rough dirt road through contryside that has changed little in 200 years.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition in American history. When the explorers set out in 1803, the United States was a coastal nation oriented toward Europe; two-thirds of its citizens lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic. When the party returned in 1806, the nation almost overnight became continental in scale, its ambitions and imagination drawn inexorably toward the Pacific by detailed new information about the western landscape.

"The journey stands, incomparably, as the transcendent achievement of its kind in this hemisphere, if not in the entire world," biologist and author Paul Russell Cutright wrote in his examination of the scientific aspects of the expedition, "Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists." Historian Bernard DeVoto called the expedition "unequaled in American history, and hardly surpassed in the history of exploration anywhere."

"It was the first report on the West, on the United States over the hill and beyond the sunset, on the province of the American future," DeVoto wrote in the introduction to the version of the expedition's journals he edited. "There has never been another so excellent or so influential. … It satisfied desire and it created desire: the desire of the westering nation."

As historian Stephen Ambrose wrote in his preface to a recent coffee table book on the expedition published by the National Geographic Society (illustrated beautifully by longtime National Geographic photographer Sam Abell), "This was the greatest camping trip of all time. And the greatest hunting trip. And one of the greatest scientific expeditions ever."

It also represents, Ambrose says, "narrative history at its best. The journals are our national epic poem."

The unquenchable popular appetite for retellings of the saga made Ambrose's 1996 book "Undaunted Courage" into a bestseller, garnered high ratings for the PBS broadcast of documentarian Ken Burns' 1997 film "Lewis and Clark" and has prompted publishers to release a growing list of new volumes about various aspects of the journey. A search of Amazon.com's online catalog for "Lewis and Clark" turns up nearly 250 titles, including novels, photographic essays, trail guides, biographies, historical and political analyses, and several versions of the expedition's journals. There is an autobiography of Lewis' dog. A cookbook. One title is in German. Nearly a quarter of the books have been published in the past two years.

The expedition's adventures will be the focus of even more intensive attention over the next four years through the actions of an often bewildering array of federal, state and local government agencies, private organizations, academic institutions, businesses and Native American tribes. Planning for the bicentennial is already well under way; after the formal kickoff next January, the celebration will spread across the country and encompass hundreds of events, large and small: picnics, festivals, re-enactments, conferences, seminars, barbecues. (See accompanying story.)

Staff photo by John Krist A new visitor center just north of St. Louis will commemorate Camp Wood, where the Corps of discovery spent the winter before beginning its journey. It is one of several projects being built in conjunction with the bicentennial.

Efforts to make money on the bicentennial also are in high gear. Besides the inevitable assortment of T-shirts and other trinkets being sold in countless markets, gas stations, visitor centers and trading posts along the route, there is a growing list of organized commercial tours on horseback, by bus, on cruise ships, in canoes. Virtually anything that moves on land or water will be carrying Lewis and Clark fans during the next few years along some part of the route, which the National Park Service administers as the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.

In the 200 years following that momentous journey, the landscape first described by Lewis and Clark has become central to the nation's image of itself - a rugged place of great mountains, deep canyons and fierce rivers, inhabited by a rich diversity of native tribes and a bestiary of remarkable creatures, where the age-old struggle to transform the wilderness into a garden would be replayed over and over.

Yet it often is difficult to distinguish the imagined American West from the true West, for the region has long been a dreamscape constructed as much from hope and longing as from bedrock and sagebrush. It has become equally difficult in recent years to distinguish the Old West from the New West, the era of supposedly inexhaustible resources from one in which limits - on the availability of water, timber, minerals, the raw material of sheer open space - are keenly felt.

Distinguishing between myth and reality, between Old and New, has never been as important as it is now, as millions of Americans flock to this rugged region to live, to play, to homestead a landscape mythologized for them by a century of popular entertainment. The choices made here in coming years - the patterns of settlement, the allocation of water rights, the balance between preserving the Western experience and the increasing demand to share in it - will reverberate across the years and miles.

On the road

I set out across the desert from Southern California on June 11, headed for the Mississippi River in a Ford Explorer packed with camping, hiking, paddling and bicycling gear. Like Lewis and Clark, I carried items I would need to barter with the natives along the way for food and fuel. They brought trade beads, knives, mirrors and other goods; I carried a Visa card. I brought a plant press, as did they, to preserve botanical specimens.

Staff photo by John Krist Sacagawea, portrayed in this statue at the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismark was referred to in expedition journals by various spellings.

They were accompanied much of the way by Sacagawea, the Shoshone wife of a French Canadian fur trader, who proved useful as an interpreter and symbolic emissary of peace. I carried a Sacagawea dollar coin as a traveler's talisman. The explorers handed out "peace medals" with a likeness of Thomas Jefferson on them, to impress tribal leaders; I carried a peace medal reproduction presented to me by a humanities scholar who takes on the character of Jefferson in a syndicated public radio program.

Like the explorers - who also were journalists, in the most literal meaning of the word - I kept a journal of my trip, although it resided on the hard drive of a laptop computer rather than in elkskin-bound notebooks. Like them, I carried maps of the West to guide me; unlike theirs, mine were accurate. In their portable library, the explorers carried books on botany, history, geology and astronomy, a nautical almanac and a four-volume dictionary; I packed a crate with field guides and other reference books, including DeVoto's one-volume version of the Lewis and Clark journals. They carried surveying and navigation tools; I carried photographic equipment.

It took me four days of leisurely driving along Interstate 40, the approximate course of old Route 66, to roll across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. From Arkansas, I turned northeast and headed into Tennessee to visit Lewis' grave. I then followed secondary roads through Tennessee and Kentucky into Illinois, crossing the Ohio River just upstream of its confluence with the Mississippi at Cairo.

From there I followed the broad Mississippi north to St. Louis, passing through one decaying little river town after another - each quiet Main Street a faded reminder that the colorful 19th century pageant of river life had been replaced long ago by anonymous freeway traffic, that riverboats and their passengers and pilots had been rendered superfluous by 18-wheelers and barge traffic that never pauses.

The road flowed through miles and miles of farmland. The countryside was beautiful, the river's board-flat floodplain hemmed in by low, wooded ridges. Everything was so green it seemed to glow. To a resident of the semi-arid Southwest, accustomed to that region's seasonal drought and brown hillsides, this is always the most striking impression of a trip to the humid, well-watered lands east of the 100th meridian: summer greenery.

Those first days were a sort of shakedown cruise, as I left behind familiar countryside and adapted to the rhythm of life on the road. Similarly, Lewis - who had spent several months in Philadelphia being tutored in botany, geology, medicine and navigation - actually began the journey on Aug. 31, 1803, in Pittsburgh. There, he picked up the 55-foot keelboat he'd ordered built, and floated down the Ohio River with 11 men. Along the way, he met Clark and began assembling the rest of the party. They reached St. Louis in early December, having used their own shakedown cruise to become familiar with their vessels (they also had procured two pirogues), and to develop a routine for packing, unpacking, setting up camp.

From St. Louis, which had been established only 40 years earlier, they moved upstream about 12 miles to the mouth of Wood River, on the east bank of the Mississippi near its confluence with the Missouri. It was there that they established their winter camp, where they would remain until the following spring.

Staff photo by John Krist Gateway Arch on the St. Louis waterfront on the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial site symbolizes the city's role as gateway to the West in the 19th Century.

No longer a frontier town, St. Louis today is a city of about 350,000 people. Arriving in the evening, I fought freeway traffic and checked into a motel. The following morning, I headed for Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, the waterfront park where St. Louis symbolically directs its gaze westward toward the sunset and the former frontier.

I hopped aboard the faux paddlewheeler for a narrated cruise, to get a feel for the power of the river and its relationship to the city. If my summer were to have a theme, surely it would be that of water - for weeks, I would be either on or near first the Missouri, then the Jefferson and Beaverhead, and finally the Clearwater, Snake and mighty Columbia.

The Gateway Arch is that rare civic monument: tasteful, elegant, simple, perfect for its place and purpose. The 91-acre memorial from which it rises is a broad patch of green right on the river, planted liberally in lawn and dotted by reflecting ponds. The Mississippi flows by just a few feet away. Upon their return to St. Louis, Lewis and Clark occupied homes on this site.

Beneath the Arch is a subterranean complex of shops, theaters and ticket counters, where visitors can buy passes to ride a tram to the top of the 630-foot monument. The Museum of Western Expansion is also located in the underground complex. Around the museum's perimeter is a long series of huge images by famed nature photographer David Muench depicting spots along the Lewis and Clark expedition's route, with journal entries in big type distributed at appropriate intervals.

It was crowded in the dimly lighted museum. I examined the many exhibits, which focus on the 19th century expansion of settlement across the western frontier - rifles, stuffed animals, Indian artifacts, dioramas. But as I walked around the edge of the room, looking at pictures of the fantastically beautiful, wild places I would see during my journey along the trail, I found myself growing impatient. It was time to be off, time to get out into the summer sunshine and head west.

"The object of your mission," Jefferson had instructed Lewis (with whom he shared a certain inventiveness in spelling and punctuation) "is to explore the Missouri river & such principal stream of it, as, by it's course & communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce."

"Across this continent." Such simple words, yet they encompassed a galaxy of possibilities - vast plains, snowy mountains and powerful rivers, a trek through grasslands and forests and floodplains, all the way to the western sea.

Words to stir the imagination. Words to lure a traveler onward. Those words - and the glorious photographs along the museum walls - promised adventure.

I left the park, climbed into my truck and headed up the river.

Next month: Along the trail from St. Louis to Onawa, Iowa, including a first-hand look at the expedition's boats and an examination of efforts to reverse decades of ecological damage by restoring natural floodplains along the dammed and dredged Missouri.