DAY ONE. November 7, 1805, Wahkiakum Indians were waiting atop the basalt cliffs of present-day Cathlamet, looking for the party of white men they had heard was coming down the river. When they spotted Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery, they sent out canoes to intercept them and lead them to their village to trade. Our journey follows Lewis and Clark's exact November 7 route from Cathlamet as they wound through the sloughs of Hunting Island to visit the Wahkiakum village, and then threaded out to the main river via wildlife rich sloughs of the White-tailed Deer National Wildlife Refuge. Sections of this route appear much as they did in 1805, including Sitka Spruce swamp with trees that were already two centuries old in Lewis and Clark's time. We will lunch on a beach along the main river and share journal entries of the route we have paddled. We will finish the trip in the protection of historic Steamboat Slough, for many years a stretch on the Lower Columbia's steamboat highway. We will end in Skamokawa, site of another Wahkiakum village where Lewis and Clark stopped to trade. Traveling with the current at an easy pace, we will have time for exploration and photography.

DAY TWO. Skamokawa marked an important turning point in the Lewis & Clark expedition. Beyond Skamokawa Bend the Columbia makes a direct run to the sea, and it was after rounding this bend that the corps first thought they saw their goal, the Pacific Ocean. In contrast to the wealth of ethnographic detail in the journal entries of November 7, the entries of November 8 are full of the excitement, danger and misery of nearing a storm-tossed ocean. We will put in at Deep River and paddle into Grays Bay where the Columbia expands to its widest point at eight miles across, providing magnificent views. The Columbia jetties and the new land which has accreted on them now protect this area from the surf that plagued the expedition. As we round Rocky Point, we will pull out the journals to share the dramatic entries from Lewis and Clark's stormy days in Grays Bay where the Corps was forced to set up camp on giant logs that were afloat at high tide. Our route along a wild shoreline is excellent for wildlife ­ black-tailed deer, river otters, entire herds of Roosevelt elk. Raccoons and waterfowl forage in the wide tidal flats, and an active bald eagle nest is visible from the water. We will lunch on a beautiful sand beach with a view across the river to Astoria before riding the incoming tide back to Deep River.