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July 28, 2004COPEMISH: Project to clone trees along path taken by Lewis and ClarkTeam expected to travel 6,000 milesByRecord-Eagle staff writer COPEMISH - David Milarch is about to add another volume to the living library he's seeded with Champion Tree Project International by cloning historically significant trees. This time, the Manistee County resident hopes to add to the saga of the Lewis and Clark expedition across the United States. "Those trees are the last living witnesses to the lives of those men," Milarch said. "Two hundred years from now, you can say these are the trees Lewis and Clark camped under." Milarch and a team of other tree experts will leave St. Louis Aug. 1 to re-trace the steps of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. This year marks the 200th anniversary of their expedition to the Pacific coast under orders from President Thomas Jefferson to discover if Americans could journey overland to the ocean along the Missouri and Columbia rivers. The Champion Tree Project team is expected to travel 6,000 miles over six weeks, 1,500 of which will be off-road. "It's probably the biggest scavenger hunt in the horticultural world," Milarch said. "Some of these areas are really remote." The bicentennial expedition team hopes to identify and take genetic tissue from up to 30 champion and historically significant trees. Once a tree is located, new growth is clipped from the top. The cuttings are sent to a nursery, where the buds are grafted onto a "parent" species of the same tree. "As soon as you find the tree, you have about a 36-hour window," Milarch said. "It's high pressure, a delicate scenario to try to get those buds attached." Milarch said the finished Lewis and Clark collection will be donated to the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.
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