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Photo by Brian Forrest For flight leader Mike Harding (right), the highlights of the journey were too numerous to mention. But none was greater than sharing the experience with his son, Lee.

historical record contained in journals, correspondence, notes and samples assembled in 1804-06 by the Corps of Discovery,” says Harding, who dreamed up the trip somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in 2001.

A blissful Hawaiian vacation had featured nothing more strenuous than turning the pages of Undaunted Courage, the Meriwether Lewis biography by Stephen Ambrose.

“My dad had been in the Navy and had circled the globe twice and crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans several times on convoy duty. Being a pilot, I started thinking about traveling the globe, like my dad,” says Harding. “I thought it would be great to retrace the routes of the Pan Am Clippers of the 1930s, flying from the West Coast to Hawaii, then on to Indonesia and the Orient.”

But somewhere over that vast stretch of ocean between Hawaii and the mainland United States, Harding realized just how daunting the Big Blue could be.

“I think about halfway back, I started thinking that, at least as a first step, flying the rivers of America would be a lot easier than flying the Pan Am routes over the ocean.”

Recreating Lewis and Clark’s trip, on the 200th anniversary, was an easy call for Harding. All he needed was a team of professionals who shared his enthusiasm for what he was selling as “a modern voyage of enlightenment.”

The first sales pitch was easy. His wife, a professional engineer, enlisted as the flight’s logistics director. From there, he sought out friends who shared his love of flight and business associates who shared his love of scientific discovery.

Harding is past president (three terms) of the International Erosion Control Association. In Southern California, which is Mother Nature’s factory outlet for mudslides, earthquakes and forest fires, Harding found no shortage of similar-minded people eager to commit their time and resources (each team member paid an equal portion of the $100,000 project cost) to get Flight of Discovery off the ground.

The team, which Harding calls “a most amazing group of people,” includes a biologist, agronomist, hydrologist, geologist, food historian, botanist, geophysicist, ecologist, estuarine scientist, anthropologist, zoologist, fluvial geomorphologist and a flight surgeon.

“In assembling the team, I had people I knew personally and trusted implicitly, since I had worked with most of them. And

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