Voyages of Rediscovery can provide school groups with the most up-to-date water quality testing equipment available. Research tools like: YSI 556 water meter and probe, turbidity tubes, secchi discs, basic test strips, and chemical water tests for the advanced grades. These tools can then be used from shore or canoe at one's river mile stretch.

Each canoe can hold 10 - 12 students, an educator or teacher, and a guide in the back. While allowing for ample lecture and activity time on and off the water, the majority of student learning comes from paddling side by side with one's classmates and the teamwork and leadership skills gained from such an expedition.

"The Columbia and its tributaries, reaching and snaking through canyons and around glaciered peaks in a thousand tortured courses, collect water from a quarter-million-square-mile basin, an area bigger than France. By the time it reaches the sea the river has gathered moisture from an atlas of geographical extremes, ranging from ice fields in the Canadian Rockies to American sagebrush desert. Its basin runs from the hamlet of Canoe River, halfway up British Columbia, to Tuscarora, Nevada. It extends from Astoria, near the Pacific coast of Oregon, to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Plateau and canyon, mountain and dune, rain forest and bunch-grass steppe: all contribute to the gathering waters. The Columbia has seven times the flow of the longer Colorado and two hundred times that of the even longer Rio Grande. Though half of the Columbia basin is desert, it gathers two and a half times as much water per square mile of its drainage area as does the mississippi-Missouri system. It is the biggest river in the American West, and the only major one to pierce the rampart of the Cascades and the Sierra Nevadas."

William Dietrich's, Northwest Passage, Pg.45 1995.