- Lacamas Lake, along with its neighbor, Round Lake, fills a depression carved by the ice age Bretz (Missoula) Floods at the end of the last ice age. Even though the lake is 180 feet above the Columbia River channel down which the floods roared, the roiling spate was deeper than that and cut across the landscape here to create a new channel. In the 1880s, two dams were built at Round Lake, which also raised the water level in Lacamas Lake. A few years later, a ditch was dug, using Chinese workers, to channel water from the lake to the Camas paper mill. In the decades that followed, further improvements were made to this system which fed the water needs of the paper mill.
