Photo by Brian Forrest On Mandan tribal lands in New Town, N.D., Mike Harding discussed the flight and the Trunks of Discovery with a group of school children.

Long before the Flight of Discovery team took to the skies last June, the impact of the journey was already being felt in public and tribal schools, museums, and interpretive centers all along the route of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery.

In 2003, as a way to spur grassroots involvement with his expedition, Mike Harding and his team distributed 15 Trunks of Discovery designed to help connect students in grades K-12 not only with the flight, but also with their environment.

Each trunk, valued at $1,000, contains educational materials in four separate learning modules teachers can use with their students to enhance classroom and field activities in agronomy, biology, botany, ecology, ethology, geology, mathematics, meteorology and zoology.

Later this year, as part of the second phase of the Flight of Discovery, Harding and his team will again fly the route to meet with students and collect data and specimens gathered at each site. Those materials may eventually be included in one of three books Harding is planning as a result of the project.

“These kids are putting their thumbprint on history,” Harding proudly says.

Members of Harding’s team camped out at the airports and ate food they packed to cut expenses, asking for little along the way.

“The only things we asked for on the journey were the friendship and the knowledge of the people we met,” Harding says. “We met so many wonderful people everywhere we went, I think the trip easily exceeded even our wildest expectations.

“It was a two-week adrenaline rush. When you fly across the Great Plains and see the sunset, or across the Rockies, or the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, your eyes are as wide open as they have been at any time in your life.”

He wonders if he will ever come down from the high of the journey. He does not go far into a day without being warmed by another Flight of Discovery moment.

“We were in New Town, on tribal ground in North Dakota on a dreary, drizzly day,” Harding recalls. “We took all of the kids that had been working with a Trunk of Discovery and put them in the plane. I don’t think any of them had ever been in a plane before. I’ll never forget the huge smiles on their faces.”

Harding said there were similar unforgettable moments every day of the journey.

“The immensity of the adventure was greater than we could have imagined,” he says. “We have all been changed because of this. Even now, it is difficult to explain. There was something that we saw or did almost every day that was the most intense experience. I think I would need three lifetimes to completely take in everything I saw.”

Harding will be occupied with the Flight of Discovery through 2006, when the team plans to fly from the journey’s endpoint at Astoria, Ore., to Washington, D.C.

That will mark the end of the Flight of Discovery, but it will not be the end of Harding’s aerial journeys. There are 14 national historic trails in the United States, and Harding would like to fly above them all.

“Starting with the Santa Fe Trail, then maybe the Oregon Trail,” Harding says, “I would like to help people better understand science and history.”

And despite being 52, Harding just may get around to each trail on his list. In flying, Harding seems to have made his own discovery, the fountain of youth.

“Flying keeps my mind active.” Harding says. “I don’t feel a day over 25.”

For more information about the Flight of Discovery, visit their Web site at: http://www.flightofdiscovery.com