Camas prairie

Named for the blue flowering camas—an important food source for all Native Americans in the interior Northwest—the Camas prairie is a traditional Nez Perce gathering place in north central Idaho.

[2] This large prairie was a Nez Perce gathering place, where camas roots were harvested for thousands of years.

Several nontreaty bands gathered at Tolo Lake in early June 1877 in anticipation of moving to the Nez Perce reservation.

Camas prairies are found over a large area, mostly privately owned, that extends many miles between the Salmon and Clearwater River drainages.

Both the prairie and basin are surrounded by north-south trending mountain ranges except where Camas Creek drains into the Flathead River.

The two main populated places within this region are Camas (Ktunaxa: ya·qa·kmumaǂki[17]) and Perma (Ktunaxa: kxunamaʔnam[17])[12][13] The basin in which the Camas prairie lies is a low-relief valley surrounded by mountains composed of metasedimentary strata that belong to the Prichard Formation of the Belt Supergroup.

The basin is filled with undifferentiated Cenozoic red, greenish, and bluish siltstone and mudstone and volcanic rock.

[12][18] The Camas prairie is well-known for the large fields of Late Pleistocene giant current ripples that cover a substantial part of its surface.

In addition to the gravel dunes and antidunes, delta-like, expansion bars accumulated below each of the former subaqueous inlets.

They are identical to the giant subaqueous bedrooms that formed on the bottom of Lake Kuray-Chuya during the Altai flood in Siberia, Russia.