Pageant News Bureau

The year 2003 marks the start of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. (The commemoration officially began Jan. 18, 2003, when the trip was first proposed.)

During the actual journey, from 1804 to 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led their small Corps of Discovery through thousands of miles of uncharted wilderness. These intrepid adventurers reached the Pacific and made it back again, an amazing trek. They survived blinding heat, numbing cold, wild rivers, snakebite and love affairs with locals (and all on government pay).

Lewis and Clark spearheaded America's inexorable march to the West. Today, a young beauty queen -- who happens to be named West -- makes the transcontinental journey routinely. Kaki West, who divides her time between Beverly Hills, Calif., and the mansion district of the Rhode Island shore, is a bicoastal girl. Back in the early 1800s, only migratory birds were bicoastal.

The America in which she grew up would hardly have been recognized by Lewis and Clark. She spent several years in MacLean, Va., a suburb of Washington, while her father was a senior official in the Reagan administration. She has lived in the bustling heart of Manhattan and attended a fashionable boarding school in Vermont.

Ms. West, whose first name is a baby-talk version of Katharine ("as in Hepburn"), has also competed in pageants from coast to coast. She represented Richard Nixon's hometown of Whittier, Calif., in the Miss America system, and has been a second runner-up and a third runner-up at Miss Rhode Island USA.

As a rising actress, she has appeared on "CSI," will play a supermodel in the upcoming film "Raising Helen" with Kate Hudson, and has a chance at a role in a movie with Harrison Ford. and we've heard there's a swimsuit calendar . . .

If Lewis and Clark had not taken the chances they did, Kaki West would not be living such an eventful life today. That's one of many reasons why America salutes them.

If only she had been around when the explorers were making their trip. She could have been Miss Corps of Discovery. Or maybe Miss West.

Photos courtesy of Kaki West

Faster, and maybe more fun