By RITA LAZZARONI
The Connecticut Post
Sunday, October 27, 2002 - Correspondent
FAIRFIELD
Survival in the era of "Survivor."
That's what Fairfield High School students are likely to think as they vie for 20 spots in a three-week wilderness adventure in Survivor, Mont.
a trip re-creating portions of Lewis and Clark's famous expedition to the Pacific.
The trip, planned for the summer of 2004, will coincide with the bicentennial of the westward exploration and complement a course called "The Lewis and Clark Experience," says Fairfield High teacher Chris Parisi.
"It's almost going to be like a reality TV show," Parisi says. Like "Survivor" contestants, he says, the students will be flown in, and then put out on the trail. And while they won't starve, they'll be more likely to eat buffalo meat than beef.
Last summer, Parisi and fellow FHS teacher Dave Nulf, who teach a collaborative English and social studies course, laid the groundwork for the project by taking a two-week reconnaissance tour of Montana.
On the upper Missouri River, they canoed 130 miles in four days, a time when they saw fewer than a dozen people.
Nulf, who teaches a senior elective called "Call of the Wild," an overnight backpacking class, says that nothing quite matches the dramatic landscape of Montana, with the rugged Rocky Mountains to the west, and the badlands and flat desert to the east.
"For an eastern greenhorn, it's like being on a different planet," Nulf said.
The teachers hope students will learn not only to appreciate how things have changed in the last 200 years, but also get a sense of what the frontier explorers endured when they set out in search of a land route to the Pacific Ocean in 1804.
Amazingly, in the two-year trip, only one man in William Lewis and Meriwether Clark's team died, and that was from appendicitis. Of the thousands of Native Americans they encountered, the expedition party killed just two Blackfeet teens caught stealing rifles.
"Being out there makes you realize how unbelievable it was that they succeeded on their mission," Nulf said. "Their fortitude and grit was pretty astounding."
The teachers also want students to understand why the Lewis and Clark bicentennial is not a cause for celebration for some of the fractured Native American tribes that still live near their ancestral lands.
While Lewis and Clark relied on French trappers and Native Americans to guide them, the Fairfield High School group will depend on the Montana Science Institute and tribal elder Curly Bear Wagner of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation to help out in Big Sky Country of Montana.
Gil and Marilyn Alexander, both recognized as National Teachers of the Year, run the non-profit Montana Science Institute at Canyon Ferry Lake, where the Fairfield group will stay for part of the trip.
The institute will arrange travel throughout Montana and lead students in hands-on activities culled from 19th-Century life on the frontier.
"We absolutely can re-create this in the new millennium," says Parisi, who along with Nulf, attended the Alexanders' graduate course this summer on the science and history of Lewis and Clark.
Students will learn to clean buffalo hides to make their own moccasins, leather-bound journals and river-worthy bullboats.
Some meals will be eaten Survivor-style, with buffalo meat as the entre. Campfires will be ignited using flint and steel, not matches.
Just like Lewis and Clark, the student explorers will catalog native flora and fauna and hike up mountain passes on the continental divide.
Accommodations will range from lakeside cabins to tents pitched in the wilderness.
Before the end of this school year, students must submit a portfolio explaining why they should be selected and what skills they offer the expedition. Videotaped entries are encouraged.
The teachers are looking for a diverse group of students for the Lewis and Clark Experience. The summer course has been approved by Fairfield Board of Education.
"It's not just going to be honors kids or athlete kids who get to go. We're looking for multi-skilled individuals with endurance and talent," Parisi said.
Still, students must be physically fit and know how to swim. They'll have to withstand Montana's weather extremes: summer temperatures fluctuate from 38 degrees in the morning to 80 degrees later in the day.
Artists, musicians, and photographers are encouraged as well as students with botanical bents.
"We'd like to have somebody who can play a fiddle," says Nulf, The explorers had two fiddlers in their party "as their major campfire entertainment."
The school expects the trip to cost a total of about $50,000 and is seeking corporate sponsors, donations and grants. The teachers hope that airfare will be covered by corporate donations of frequent flier miles and that airlines will waive some of their restrictions with that rewards program.
Eastern Mountain Sports on Black Rock Turnpike, part of a national chain of outdoor specialty stores, is already offering a combination of donated camping equipment and discounts on required personal gear for the trip.
"Our relationship with Fairfield High School goes way back," says Mitchell Hirsch, manager of the Fairfield EMS. "That a local high school group would want to replicate a portion of the journey in the American West struck us as very unique and very worthy of our support."
The store manager said that during EMS's annual fall sale this past weekend the store will post information about the Lewis and Clark Experience.
"We're excited about this program and we hope that it becomes known so that other local community based businesses, stores, and citizens will want to contribute," Hirsch said.