ANNA KING/NW NEWS NETWORK
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Some 15,000 years ago, an ice dam broke in Montana. Water cascaded across the Northwest in some of the largest flooding ever to happen on Earth. And the Ka-milt-pah people climbed up to one of the highest points on the Columbia River.
“There were lookouts and warnings to the Ka-milt-pah band members. Prior to the big flood, they escaped the canyon,” says Elaine Harvey, a Ka-milt-pah member, known in English as the Rock Creek Band of the Yakama Nation.
As the stories go, the area known as Put-a-lish, or the Goodnoe Hills, is where people survived the walls of water slamming downstream in the Missoula Floods.