12/25/2025
Author CJ Cherryh’s take on the Camas Prairie’s 50-foot-high ripples—and a GREAT aerial shot of Camas Prairie’s rippled topography.
These massive ripples in Montana were sculpted by some of the greatest floods in Earth’s history. 🌊
At first glance, these formations on the Camas Prairie north of Missoula, Montana might look like ordinary hills—but they’re anything but ordinary.
These are giant current ripples, each one hundreds of feet apart and dozens of feet high, carved not by wind or plate tectonics, but by some of the largest floods in Earth’s history.
Between 13,000 and 15,000 years ago, ice dams on the Clark Fork River in modern-day Montana caused glacial Lake Missoula to form.
At it's largest extent, Lake Missoula was 2,000 feet deep, stretched eastward for 200 miles, and contained more water than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined.
When the ice dams suddenly collapsed, they released walls of water hundreds of feet high that inundated portions of modern-day eastern Washington and Oregon.
With flood speeds approaching 65 miles per hour, the lake would have drained in as little as 48 hours. 😲
As the huge volume of water rushed across the landscape at terrifying speed, it sculpted the land into these wave-like patterns.
From the ground, they’re easy to miss—but from above, the ripples are the obvious signature of a catastrophe that occurred thousands of years ago.
Today, the Camas Prairie ripples draw geologists, historians, and curious travelers eager to see a rare record of Earth’s violent and transformative past in the heart of western Montana.
Source: Wikipedia, USGS
