It took two and a half years to wrap up the first Lewis and Clark expedition.

The second was wrapped much more quickly.

Took about two months.

If you ask Debbie Kruger, owner of Mandan's Lindy Sue's Candies, she'll say it was a bit of chocolate-dipped serendipity. Because of good fortune and hard work, an idea for a series of Lewis and Clark-themed candy bar wrappers quickly became reality.

Kruger teamed with a California artist to create six different wrappers for a candy bar of her creation. The Lewis & Clark Bar "Expedition Series" will become available next month. Sheets of the new wrappers rolled off the presses at Richtman's Printing on Tuesday.

Richtman's will print 10,000 copies of each of the six designs. Once the first in the series sells out, the next will be issued, and so on. The wrappers will cover a milk chocolate and caramel bar Kruger created years ago, previously known as The Lindy Sue Bar. Her 6-year-old Lewis & Clark Bar will keep its original wrapper, as will her 3-year-old Sacagawea Bar.

"I've wanted to do a Lewis and Clark series over the last couple years," Kruger said. "But I hadn't seen an artist I liked for all the wrappers I wanted to come out with. Then I saw these. They're all perfect."

Two months ago, Kruger was featured in Good Housekeeping magazine. Artist R.L. "Bob" Rickards saw the piece and had his manager contact the Mandan businesswoman. He wanted to take the bars on the road and use them as a tool to get his Lewis and Clark paintings into studios.

It didn't take them long to realize this relationship could be symbiotic.

"We just clicked," Kruger said.

Kruger bought the rights to six of Rickards' paintings. Graphic artist Colleen Bredahl, at Richtman's, made the artwork fit the wrappers.

The first in the series, "The Departure," depicts the Corps of Discovery shoving off on its expedition in May 1804. Bars featuring that wrapper will be available next month, Kruger said. She's already sold 7,000 of them, even though the bars - made with her recipe but at a Massachusetts factory - have yet to be produced.

Next will come "Shifting Sands," which shows the expedition getting flooded out on a sandbar in South Dakota in September 2004. The next four - "The Stand Off," "A Commitment to Proceed," "Mandan At Last" and "The Hunt" - follow the Corps to its wintering grounds at Fort Mandan, near present-day Washburn.

"It was a fun project," Bredahl said. "It'll be out there everywhere."

The Lewis & Clark "Expedition Series" will be available across the country, including nine states along the Lewis and Clark Trail, Kruger said.

If all of the chocolate bars sell out, a second series - featuring different Lewis and Clark pieces by Rickards - could be issued in 2006. But the wrappers in the current series will never be reprinted, Kruger said.

For more information, contact Kruger at debbie@lindysue.com. Lindy Sue's Candies is located in Mandan Drug on Main Street.

(Reach Tony Spilde at 250-8260 or tspilde@ndonline.com.)