PORTLAND — Lewis and Clark never had it this good.

When the Corps of Discovery made its way down the great rivers of the Northwest in 1805 and 1806, the 32 expedition members did so in cedar canoes they had hewn on the banks of Idaho’s Clearwater River, just upstream from its confluence with the Snake River.

During five weeks of October and November, their rustic vessels carried them 465 miles down the Snake and Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean. At a simple redoubt the men dubbed Fort Clatsop, they spent a soggy winter before retracing their steps across the Rocky Mountains to the eastern United States.

Corps members spent much of their time tired and hungry, weary of muscle and bone, parched dry or soaked to the skin. But the route they helped to establish at the start of the 19th century pioneered more leisurely travel along this corridor in the 21st. And today, it is anything but an ordeal.

Take, for instance, the voyages of the SS Legacy. Operated by Un-Cruise Adventures, this 192-foot, diesel-powered steamer takes as many as 88 passengers and 30 crew on a similar route between April and October.

Departing Saturday afternoons from the Willamette River waterfront in downtown Portland, the 32-year-old ship — a replica of an 1898 Pacific coastal steamer — navigates up the Columbia to the Tri-Cities and back down the river to Astoria before returning to Portland the following Saturday morning. Several of its trips extend up the Snake River all the way to Clarkston, Washington, where they are met by jet boats that continue into the Hells Canyon Wilderness.

There are no hardships in this cruise. One all-inclusive (albeit not inexpensive) price includes a comfortable private berth, three gourmet meals a day, happy hours and a 24-hour open bar. There are massage therapy rooms and hot tubs on the open top deck close to the cardio equipment. Almost-daily shore excursions, evening lectures and other presentations are a part of the package.

History afloat

Photographer Barb Gonzalez and I joined the SS Legacy on its “heritage” itinerary, a seven-night cruise that emphasizes history — primarily Lewis and Clark and native American, along with 20th-century dam construction on the Columbia and Snake rivers. An option would have been a wine-tasting cruise, but we enjoy plenty of wines even when we’re not a captive audience.

After rendezvousing at Portland’s World Trade Center with shipmates from all over the United States and Canada, we boarded the Legacy late on a Saturday afternoon. We were led to the boat by three fellow travelers in elegant Victorian costume who introduced themselves as our Heritage Team — in essence, our guides for the week. Kenne Williams, a professional actor from Kansas now a resident of Hawaii, worked with Julia Kehr of Michigan and Jenny Lynn of Idaho to keep us informed and entertained.

Williams’ penchant for the spotlight was clear, especially during a Wednesday night performance of a script he himself wrote about the enigmatic Sam Hill, the early-20th-century Quaker industrialist through whose efforts the Historic Columbia River Highway and Maryhill community were built.

“I’ve spent most of my time as an actor on the stage, which I believe takes more skill,” said Williams, who described himself as the “only original member” of the company’s Columbia River cruise program. “I enjoy that.”

The ship’s captain, Scott Clendenin, greeted us as we stepped aboard the boat. He has spent nearly four decades on his own stage: the water.

Clendenin retired in 2000 after 24 years in the U.S. Coast Guard, much of it in the Bering Sea of Alaska. After working several years as a firefighter, he said, he returned to his beloved boats nine years ago, plying the waters of the Columbia and lower Snake. Since 2014 he has been a captain for Un-Cruise Adventures, a Seattle-based company of which he speaks highly.

“The real challenge comes when we get ready to sail,” said the captain, who now lives in Gearhart. “From November to March, we dry-dock at the shipyards of Fishermen’s Wharf, in Seattle, to do our annual fire and damage control. The third weekend of March, we head back to Astoria with a new crew.

“We have just 12 days from that point to get ourselves together to get out of port. All of our mates and deckhands must be able to read the river. Twelve days is not a long time — but when we throw the lines off the boat, we no longer have ‘911’ to call.”

Clendenin’s first mate and chief medical officer on this trip was Jared Passenger, a Portland-area native who now lives in Galveston, Texas. His engineering team was headed by Mike Tuckwiller, whose responsibilities include two 1,055-horsepower Caterpillar engines and a pair of 635-horsepower generators.

Cruising the Gorge

Much of our cruising we did at night, in order to leave daylight hours free for on-shore excursions. We entered our first lock, on the Bonneville Dam, at Sunday daybreak, giving early risers an opportunity to watch as the Legacy was lifted 70 feet during a 30-minute passage through the first Columbia River dam.

We returned later that day for a guided tour of the dam. Its powerhouse, spillway and original navigation lock were built in 1937 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Park ranger Monty Biggs took us through exhibits that described how the dam, a National Historic Landmark since 1987, provides hydroelectric power to Portland and other cities throughout the Northwest. He led us past an elaborate fish ladder through which, he declared, 97 percent of spawning salmon and steelhead survive their climactic annual journey upriver to perpetuate their species.

We also paid a visit to 611-foot Multnomah Falls, highest in the Northwest and a long-standing symbol of the Gorge. Many passengers, making a first-time visit, walked the steep path to the lower bridge, where they got a closer look at the spectacular upper falls.

We spent our first full afternoon cruising the Gorge from Cascade Locks east, dodging sail boarders from Hood River to the mouth of the Klickitat River, 10 miles upstream. More correctly, perhaps, they were eluding us. But there are few finer sights than that of colorful kites and sails, controlled by athletic men and women who leave a rooster-tail of spray in their wakes, before a perpetual backdrop of majestic, snow-capped Mount Hood to the south of the river.

By the time the boat was passing The Dalles, 90 miles from Portland and approaching the second of eight navigation locks on the Columbia and Snake, we had seen riverside vegetation change from temperate rainforest to semi-arid. The different climate was even more evident when we awoke the next morning, having turned onto the Snake River just southeast of Pasco, Washington. As little as 4 inches of rain falls annually on the stark hills that flank the river.

But even here, our voyage was never dull. Chef Tim Baker and his staff, which included sous and pastry chefs, offered a choice of three gourmet courses for every meal, typically featuring a meat, a seafood and a vegetarian option. And it wasn’t simply steak, salmon and greens: Meals included stewed short ribs, grilled duck, poached black cod and elaborate salads, all served by a staff of professional servers.

Multiple wine options were available with each meal or in the lounge, where bartender Mason Roberts poured a carefully considered selection of Washington and Oregon wines. In addition to being the venue for all presentations, the lounge, with its 1890s-style pressed-tin ceiling, included a library and a piano for guests’ enjoyment.

A hellish excursion

As we docked in Clarkston, opposite Lewiston, Idaho, at the confluence of the Clearwater River, we were visited by Nez Perce Indian storyteller J.R. Spencer. Dressed in traditional garb, Spencer spun tales of tribal legends that preceded the arrival of Lewis and Clark or the great Nez Perce chief of the 1870s, Chief Joseph.

The Lewis and Clark party had no more than a brief glimpse of Hells Canyon from a distant hilltop on its return journey. Joseph and his tribesmen knew the chasm well, as the Nez Perce homelands extended across both sides of the river.

In a six-hour excursion, we got to know a stretch of the Snake better than Lewis and Clark could have hoped. Two jet boats collected our group at our Clarkston moorage at 10 on Wednesday morning, taking us upriver some 35 miles to the Nature Conservancy’s Garden Creek Ranch at the edge of the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area. There we enjoyed a salad-and-sandwich lunch and a quick swim in the chilly river, beneath mountains that loomed more than a mile above us, before continuing past the confluence of the Salmon River, the longest undammed stream in the lower 48 states.

Certainly, the highlight of our Hells Canyon trip was the wildlife watching. Small herds of bighorn sheep grazed the sparse greenery along the river’s rim at several locations, sharing the shoreline with great blue herons. A family of river otters dove and danced beside the stream’s edge, at one point startling a covey of chukar partridges. Bald and golden eagles soared above populations of mule deer, keeping a keen eye open for smaller, prey-worthy mammals.

We cruised at night and moored the next morning on the Columbia at Richland, Washington. Here our group paid a visit to the new REACH Museum. Its exhibits describe the scope of the great Missoula and Bonneville floods, which inundated the Columbia Basin some 14,000 years ago and shaped many of its modern landforms, as well as the World War II-era development of the plutonium bomb, developed here at the Hanford reservation before testing in New Mexico and use in Japan.

Before returning to the boat to continue our downriver cruise, we had lunch at the Terra Blanca winery, at the edge of the Red Mountain Viticultural Area near the town of Benton City. Keith and ReNae Pilgrim established the winery in 1993, and since have earned a reputation for fine reds — especially cabernet sauvignon and syrah — along with chardonnays and a variety of other wines.

Museum time

On Day Six, a Thursday, we docked early at The Dalles and enjoyed separate excursions before and after lunch. Morning took us to Maryhill, the would-be utopian oasis developed by Sam Hill (1857-1931). His pacifist memorial to World War I dead, Stonehenge, is a one-third scale replica of England’s iconic prehistoric monument, built in 1918 of concrete on a bluff overlooking the Columbia.

A mile downriver, the Maryhill Art Museum has notable collections of sculpture by European master Auguste Rodin and furnishings from the royal house of Romania, along with historic French fashions and Native American blankets. Carefully cultivated friendships with women of substance — including Queen Marie of Romania, sugar heiress Alma De Bretteville Spreckels of San Francisco, and dancer Loie Fuller of Paris — was largely responsible for development of this site after Hill’s death.

An afternoon trip to the Columbia Gorge Discovery Museum introduced visitors to the images of Bend photographer Loren Irving, whose recent work traces the travels of 1840s explorer John C. Frémont through the American West. With a focus both on human and natural history, the museum also has a raptor program that features owls and kestrels, eagles and hawks.

Captain Clendenin spent much of the foggy, rainy night that followed steering a careful course back downriver, avoiding not only rocks and shoals but also native fishermen with drift nets and gill nets. By morning, however, as clouds parted to welcome coastal sunshine, we were docked beside the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria. Outstanding exhibits here focus on the treacherous Columbia River Bar and its “Graveyard of the Pacific,” a shipwreck-prone collision of incoming tides and outgoing river flow that we were glad to have survived.

The day’s excursions took in Fort Clatsop, where volunteer guide Jim Byrne vividly described how the Lewis and Clark party spent the wet winter of 1805-06, and continued to the Astoria Column, a colorful viewing tower built atop a city hill in the 1920s. The oldest American city on the West Coast, Astoria dates its history from 1811 when it was established as a fur-trading post. Scores of pilings along its Columbia shore are memories of the salmon canneries that once lined this riverfront.

The following morning, we awoke back at Governor Tom McCall Riverfront Park in Portland. Here we said goodbye to our new friends, many of whom awaited transportation to the airport or train station for their trips home.

It was easier for me and Gonzalez, who had left our car parked in a nearby garage for a week. After seven nights of luxury afloat, though, our three-hour return drive to Bend seemed even more arduous than tracing the trail of Lewis and Clark on the Columbia River.

— Reporter: janderson@bendbulletin.com