Space Age Makes Retracing Trek of Lewis and Clark Easier but No Picnic : Expedition: Help from a navigational satellite is no cure for mosquitoes and sore muscles.

After a week of poling his canoe upstream, Tom Warren sat in the smoke of the campfire to escape the mosquitoes--and vaulted from the 19th Century to the 21st Century.

Warren is retracing the steps of Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Lt. William Clark. But where Lewis and Clark used compasses, sextants and their knowledge of the wilderness, Warren uses the Garmin global-positioning system.

He punched up a satellite fix on the Lewis and Clark expedition. “We’re 1.4 miles from Clark’s Aug. 10 campsite,” Warren said.

The Space Age gizmo in one hand, he pointed with the other across the meandering river. There, through a stand of dead cottonwoods crowned with blue heron nests and beyond, his heroes walked 187 years ago.

At the behest of President Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark sought a Northwest Passage to wrest the fur trade from the English and eliminate the need for Yankee sailing ships to round dangerous Cape Horn. They trekked the Louisiana Territory, just purchased from France.

“The thing that struck me the most about the Lewis and Clark expedition is that it demonstrates the can-do American spirit,” Warren said. “Here I come, I’m on my way. Quit talking about it and do it.”

So the 39-year-old chiropractor from Tulsa spent two years researching the trip and signing up corporate sponsors. He recruited his friend of 20 years, John Hilton, 46, an administrator at Mineral Area Community College in Flat River, Mo., and Hilton’s son, Johnnie, 24, who drives the support truck. He has been nicknamed York, after Clark’s slave.

And on June 1, they set out from St. Louis to retrace the westward route of Lewis and Clark, using the Missouri and other rivers that were the highways of the 19th Century.

Others have tracked Lewis and Clark, although not with satellite navigation.

Many do it in cars. Some Green Berets ran an outboard raft up the Missouri in 1972, but they hiked overland rather than follow the Jefferson and Beaverhead rivers, as Lewis and Clark did, and as Warren and Hilton are doing.

This is not to suggest that Warren and Hilton are re-creating the Lewis and Clark expedition in every particular.

Lewis and Clark ate flour, corn and pork they carried and buffalo, deer and elk they shot along the way. Warren and Hilton carry heat and serve packages of Nutri-System fettuccine Alfredo, beef stew and oatmeal.

A band of Shoshone Indians camped near the Continental Divide gave Lewis and Clark their first taste of Pacific salmon. Tom and Sue Harmon, owners of Hutchinson’s Fly Shop in the village of Sheridan, fed Warren and Hilton brownies and pineapple upside-down cake.

Lewis and Clark danced to fiddle music in camp. Warren and Hilton popped The Doors into their truck tape deck.

Lewis and Clark bought horses from the Shoshone to cross the Rocky Mountains; Warren and Hilton are riding bicycles 350 miles.

And Warren and Hilton are roaring over all but about 500 miles of the route in a Jetcraft jetboat powered by a 270 Chevy engine, their extra gear loaded in a four-wheel-drive Chevy pickup. Lewis and Clark set out in a keelboat and two big canoes, or pirogues, that had to be sailed, rowed or towed upstream.

It took Lewis and Clark a year and a half to travel 4,000 miles, departing on May 14, 1804, and arriving at the mouth of the Columbia River in November, 1805. Warren and Hilton are making the trip in 2 1/2 months; they expect to finish about Aug. 13.

And although the 1992 trip is expected to cost about $250,000, Lewis, Clark and their 45 men made do with $2,500 appropriated by Congress.

But in Montana, where the central thread of the mighty Missouri becomes just a meandering stream, the modern expedition stepped back in time into canoes, poling against the current for 100 winding river miles.

The Beaverhead runs down the eastern slope of the Continental Divide, meandering through a valley now filled with hay, mustard grass and cattle. It gets its name from Beaverhead Rock. Viewed from downstream, the landmark is the image of the beaver that drew the trappers west.

“In the jetboat, you just throw a bunch of gas in it,” Warren said.

“In the canoe, you throw your soul in it,” Hilton added.

They were joined on the Beaverhead by Ed Hayden, a muscular 65-year-old retired bricklayer, carpenter and plasterer from Oakdale, Conn., who is national masters canoe poling champion. Hayden read about the trip and called Warren, offering to coach them.

Poling is not a leisure sport like, say, miniature golf. To get a straight push, you must reach your arms far out to the side, losing leverage. To correct course, imagine twisting a heavy carpet on the floor with your feet by gripping a door jamb. No muscle escapes the effort, and each morning finds a new one protesting.

There is no rest without losing headway. Lose control and the canoe swings crosscurrent, where it can easily dip a gunwale, fill with water or capsize. Turning corners is tougher than going straight, and the river is one corner after another.

After a week of poling, Hilton had a new appreciation for exploration in the 19th Century. Sitting in camp, he quoted from Lewis: “The men were so much fortiegued today that they wished much that navigation was at an end that they might go by land.”

One thing that has not changed is the mosquitoes, which Lewis and Clark wrote of so often that they spelled the insect 16 different ways.

During a lunch stop, Warren and Hilton got a visit from rancher John Malesich, who rode his motorcycle for a look at what kind of people would push their canoes against the current. He had heard all his life that the great explorers passed by here.

As for retracing these famous footsteps: “I guess if you’ve got the time, that’s OK,” he said, then excused himself to tend to his irrigation.

If Lewis and Clark were to retrace their trek, they would be impressed with the progress civilization has brought to the wilderness, but not with the state of the rivers, Warren said.