For more galleries of Zumwalt Prairie photographs, click here.

If your goal is taking pretty photos, realize that Oregon’s Zumwalt Prairie is as much about mountains as it is about prairie. To the south, these grasslands are flanked by the scenic backdrop of the Wallowa Mountains and to the east by Idaho’s Seven Devils Mountains, both ranges approaching 10,000 ft in elevation. Your photos here will likely include mountains whether you want mountains in your photos or not. And your photos will often include plunging canyons as well, because the prairie is situated on the brink of Hells Canyon National Recreation to the east.

Much of Oregon’s northeast corner is a dissected plateau—so dissected by mountains and canyons that it is often not recognizable as a plateau at all. But the 330,000 acres of Zumwalt Prairie are less dissected and relatively flat, justifying its description as a prairie. Here can be found flowered grasslands stretching expansively to the northern and western horizons and to the snowy mountain ranges on the south and east.

Why does grassland prairie persist here? Why has it not been plowed under? Because it is high (4,000 to 5,000 ft.), somewhat arid (15-17 inches of precipitation), and because it partly escaped the thick blanket of windblown accumulations of soil that blessed the Palouse Prairie to the north during the Pleistocene. Zumwalt is sometimes called the only surviving segment of the original Palouse Prairie, but it survives only because it is less attractive for agriculture, i.e., because it is significantly unlike the Palouse Prairie.