Campers carefully turned over river rocks in a quest to add crustaceans to the night’s dinner menu.

The girls recommended storing captive crawdads in a Nalgene water bottle. The boys built a crawdad corral by stacking small rocks where the Jefferson River met the shore. The boys hoped the crayfish would go claw-to-claw in a sort of primitive UFC.

The river flowed low and slow Wednesday. Yet, for the sake of safety, the campers dragged along a grass rope they’d woven that was thick as a Burmese python. It later supported a spirited tug-of-war in the midst of the river named by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

History records that Lewis and Clark ate crayfish.

Their expedition traveled up the Jefferson River roughly 220 years before these 20 young people, most of them in pre-adolescen

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