Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions but you really climb for the hell of it.
The negative cost of Lewis and Clark entering the Garden of Eden is that later expeditions regardless of what they were intended to do later expeditions did not deal with the native peoples with the intelligence with the almost kindly resolve that Lewis and Clark did.
The government's view is that the best time to announce bad news news that it doesn't want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday when it will wind up in the Saturday papers which if you were readers then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.
When you have a great and difficult task something perhaps almost impossible if you only work a little at a time every day a little suddenly the work will finish itself.