(Riverton, WY) – The fascinating story of a historic record-breaking journey will be told as the Riverton Museum’s Discovery Speaker Series presents Allen Maybee and Roger Melton’s ‘2001 Jet Ski Expedition: A Polaris Journey to Join the Past with the Future’, tonight at 6:00 p.m..
Tonight’s program will include a first-person account of a historic re-creation of the jet ski trek following the trace of Lewis and Clark. Their mission was in celebration of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery from 1804 to 1806, and to celebrate the Polaris Genesis personal watercraft. The event is free and open to the public.
Maybee and Melton originally wanted to do the trek in a canoe, all hand-powered“…but we knew enough about the Missouri River to know you cannot take a hand-powered craft up against that current,” Maybee said. “When Lewis and Clark came up the river, the current was running about four to five knots. Now, the Army Corps of Engineers have narrowed the channel…doubled the speed, so now it’s eight to ten knots. That’s why we had to use jet skis.”
Lewis and Clark started their trek in Illinois from the mouth of the Missouri River. But since Maybee and Melton were celebrating the Louisiana Purchase, they felt they should start in the Gulf of Mexico. They began in Biloxi into bayou country and up the Mississippi with three jet skis named Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea.
The jet ski now displayed at the Riverton Museum is Maybee’s ski, the William “Clark”. Melton drove the Meriweather “Lewis,” and the “Sacagawea” was a backup ski.
The trek went through New Orleans and launched into the Mississippi River, up 1000 miles landing on the Illinois side of St. Louis, “right where Lewis and Clark would have been standing,” Maybee said. “Then up we went, committing ourselves to 3000 miles of river on our jets.”
The trek, from start to finish…from Biloxi, Mississippi to Astoria, Oregon, took 43 days.
Maybee and Melton broke several records, among which were the first to cross the United States on a jet ski from East to West and from South to North. They also established the world distance record of 6000 miles in 43 days, making their journey about as historic as the Lewis & Clark expedition itself.
“We weren’t setting out to break any kind of records at all,” Maybee said. “We wanted to follow Lewis and Clark and in the process, broke some records.”
The Riverton Museum is located at 700 East Park Avenue and is open daily from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. General admission is $6; students and seniors are $5, and kids 5 and under are free. For more information about the museum’s events and activities, visit their Facebook page or the Fremont County Museum System website.