Searching for Lewis and Clark's campsites is Ken Karsmizki's passion. In the past 15 years, the archaeologist has spent countless hours digging for vestiges of the expedition.

Now he's getting some help from above.

Karsmizki, curator of history at the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in The Dalles, is teaming with NASA scientists in using remote-sensing technology aboard aircraft and satellites to help identify a few of the 600 campsites where William Clark and Meriwether Lewis' band of explorers stayed.

"NASA has a range of remote-sensing applications, and each one might give us a different clue about the campsite locations," Karsmizki said. "They can look at big slices of the landscape, where we're looking at an acre at a time. So I think it's going to be helpful in refining the size of our search areas."

Marco Giardino, an archaeologist with the space agency's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, said his staff is going through archives of images from space and collecting new data to aid in the campsite hunt. Giardino, acting director of the Earth Science Application Directorate, said the research team is developing three-dimensional maps of the entire Lewis and Clark trail.

New images, old maps The NASA scientists are combining satellite images of the modern landscape with detailed historical maps from the 1804-06 expedition to help Karsmizki find campsites. They also can create 360-degree views of what an area would have looked like.

"With these maps, folks like Ken can get a much better sense of the kind of topography that the Corps of Discovery would have encountered," Giardino said. "You can use low-resolution imagery so that you can't see the cities and roads, so you get more of a virtual sense of what it must have looked like in those days."

Other remote-sensing techniques can search for soils high in phosphates, where privies or refuse piles might have been, Giardino said.

In recent weeks, Karsmizki also has received help from the Air Force in looking for the iron frame from the explorers' boat south of Great Falls, Mont., along the Missouri River. The boat was abandoned when it failed, but the vessel's 36-foot-long, 220-pound frame might be buried in the area.

The heaviest piece of equipment on the expedition, the iron frame would be a noticeable object beneath the surface, even though half of it might have corroded in the past 200 years, Karsmizki said.

Robots scan site In September, the Air Force sent two remote-controlled vehicles to the site from Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. Equipped with high-tech electromagnetic sensors that can detect metal, the robots -- the largest of which was a 4-ton stainless-steel-tracked vehicle -- covered 30 acres of a field near the explorers' Upper Portage camp on White Bear Islands.

The computer-linked robots, designed to look for land mines or unexploded bombs and other ordnance with precision, were controlled from a vehicle that houses the system's operators and computers.

"At this point there is nothing that we know that says 'this is it,' " said Karsmizki, who will examine the data recorded by the instruments. "But they were able to cover about 30 acres in a little under four days. We can cover only about a half-acre a day by carrying a magnetometer. So they could cover more area a lot faster than we can."

Karsmizki has been involved in investigating several campsites, including Fort Clatsop near Astoria. In addition to the Upper Portage camp, he is looking for Fort Mandan in North Dakota, where the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1804-05.

Three years ago, Karsmizki announced that his research team had found the first physical evidence of one of the expedition's campsites. His team pinpointed the Lower Portage campsite, about 10 miles northeast of Great Falls, he said. They found three campfires spaced 50 feet apart in military fashion, an iron push pin that might have been used for Clark's mapmaking, a flawed gun flint the explorers might have discarded, and hundreds of bison bones, some showing signs of butchering with iron tools.

The discovery was made after 12 years of digging, Karsmizki said, and he hopes the space-age technology will make looking for other camps easier.

He and the federal agencies were linked by David Weston, director of aerospace and remote-sensing initiatives at Montana State University's TechLink Center. The center is financed by NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense to help government researchers work with individual scientists.

"I kind of like to imagine what Lewis and Clark would think of all this," Weston said. "They were technology innovators for their time. If they could see that we're using robots and satellites to map out their sites, I think they'd be very impressed." You can reach Richard L. Hill at richardhill@news.oregonian.com or 503-221-8238.

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