A Century of Summer Tradition Washed Away

In a matter of minutes, the river took it all—one hundred summers of enchanted girlhood, gone. Camp Mystic, the songs, the cabins, generations of sacred routine, washed away.

Certain tragedies stay lodged in the mind because they’re impossible to reconcile.

In the winter of 2005, a mudslide in La Conchita, California, killed a man’s wife and three daughters while he was out getting them ice cream. After a week of brutal rain, the hillside gave way in just eight seconds. When he returned, his family was gone. News reports described how he dropped to his knees and clawed through the debris with his bare hands after hearing his daughter’s final scream.
“I would’ve eaten through it if my hands gave out,” he said, hysterical, on live TV.

I think of them every time I pass the empty lot where their house once stood, high up on the cliff off PCH, on my way up the coast to Santa Barbara.

In our own community, it was a Sunday morning crash last summer that etched itself into unwanted memory. A sharp smash rang out from below the slope where all the neighborhood kids cross daily on E-bikes. It sounded like an explosion. My heart stopped. I ran through the house, calling for each of my boys, fearing it was one of them.

By the time we reached the bottom of the hill, a handful of neighbors were already at the scene, pulling a young girl from the wreckage—her tiny body limp on a patch of grass, blood trickling from both ears. They had been on their way to church. Two brothers in pressed dress shirts. Their father, unconscious at the wheel. A drunk driver, enraged after a fight with his wife, had blown through a stoplight and slammed into them, killing the girl on impact.

I see a flash of her every time I come to a stop at that light.

The Camp Mystic horror is another I know I won’t be able to shake. It is every parent’s worst nightmare: sending your child off to a beloved summer camp, not knowing it will be the last time you kiss the top of their head alive.

For the past three summers, we’ve sent our youngest son to a STEM camp for gifted children. In a tiny dorm room, I’d linger at drop-off to unpack his suitcase and make his bed, arranging a few familiar comforts for the seven days he’d be away from us. On afternoons I didn’t hear from him, I was anxious and irritable. The fear that something could happen while he was gone—completely out of my control—consumed me.

Despite the worry, it was always worth it. I had always fantasized about summer camp as a kid the way they show it in movies. Hayes was the only one of my boys who jumped at the chance to go away to study for a week and came home each season inspired and enriched, full of new ideas and friendships he kept as pen pals throughout the year. Memories I knew he would cherish later, understanding how it helped build confidence and character—away from his brothers, among like-minded kids with shared goals and interests.

Yesterday, as news broke, I turned my IG account into a public text chain to relay information as it poured in. In moments like this, I’ve found it’s the most helpful way to engage and connect the public directly—mothers helping mothers, without network production delays or editorial restraints getting in the way.

I shared whatever photos and details were sent to help locate missing people. So many were young girls between 8 and 10 years old. Heartbreaking images and desperate prayers were lifted for them across the country.

The youngest girls at Camp Mystic were in for the time of their lives. A Christian camp nestled in the Texas Hill Country, where faith met tradition and legacy. It was where the most prominent families in Dallas sent their daughters—a place with deep generational ties.

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Their cabin sat closest to the river. The youngest girls were asleep when the flood arrived.

At 1:14 a.m. on the Fourth of July, the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning for Kerr County. The Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in just 45 minutes, reaching its second-highest level on record.

One brutal rush of water swept nearly a century of tradition off the riverbanks, leaving behind only fragments of what had been a sacred rite of passage for generations of Texas girls. Many were spared. Others were not. The crisis came too fast for warnings to matter—though local heroes did what they could to ensure as many survivors escaped as possible.

Julian Ryan was one of them. In the early morning darkness, he and his fiancée, Christina Wilson, woke to rising water inside their trailer in Ingram. It was ankle-deep at first, then waist-high. The bedroom door had jammed. Julian had just gotten home from a dishwashing shift. In desperation, he punched through a window to get his family out. Jagged glass severed a main artery in his arm.

As the current overtook their home, Julian turned to Christina and said what would be his final words: “I’m sorry. I’m not going to make it. I love y’all.”

Their two boys—just thirteen months and six years old—survived by floating on a mattress with their grandmother until rescuers arrived. Julian’s body was recovered hours later.

“He died a hero, and that will never go unnoticed,” his sister told local news.

Concerns about the safety of those riverside cabins had existed for years. But Camp Mystic had survived wars, recessions, droughts, and decades of generational change. It had seen its girls evolve from roping cattle to filming TikToks in matching pajama sets. Founded in 1926 by University of Texas coach E.J. “Doc” Stewart—originally known as Stewart’s Camp for Girls—it offered the rituals of its time: archery, roping, marksmanship. Over the decades, it became a rite of passage for the daughters of Texas’s most prominent families. The daughters of President Lyndon B. Johnson once attended. Laura Bush served as a counselor in her youth. Camp Mystic was its own kind of religion in spirit—devoted to the rituals of girlhood: river baptisms, shared hairbrushes, friendship bracelets knotted beneath a heavy summer sky. Its 700 acres stretched along the South Fork of the Guadalupe, southwest of Hunt. A shell road led in and out, etched into the memory of anyone who ever made that drive. For nearly a hundred years, it remained untouched—aside from two summers during World War II, when the Army used the grounds to care for wounded veterans.

Until now.

On the morning of its undoing, floodwaters arrived under cover of night, too swiftly for warnings to matter. A wall of water swept the camp as they slept, dragging with it people and children alike.

Among the dead was longtime camp director Dick Eastland, who died trying to move girls to higher ground. Jane Ragsdale, director of a nearby camp, was also swept away. Her camp was between sessions. No girls were there at the time.

Anyone familiar with the Hill Country knows its risks. The region is called Flash Flood Alley for a reason. Rivers like the Guadalupe cut through steep limestone canyons that become deadly traps when storms hit. Locals will tell you: storms don’t always announce themselves.

Still, online blame was recklessly cast before rescue efforts had even begun. Some pointed to weather manipulation programs like HAARP. Others blamed Trump’s DOGE budget cuts, claiming they had gutted the infrastructure meant to issue weather alerts. Theories spread faster than facts, as if being first to predict disaster mattered more than mourning the dead.

The lack of empathy in efforts to politicize the situation was staggering. Houston pediatrician Dr. Christina Propst posted cruel sentiments aimed at Trump supporters: “May all visitors, children, non-MAGA voters, and pets be safe and dry. A Kerr County MAGA voted to gut FEMA. They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for. Bless their hearts.”

TDS showed up in its ugliest form. Conspiracy followed close behind.

This is how the internet works now. Tragedy fuels immediate conspiracy, and viral content spreads to confuse and divide. Empathy is quickly buried beneath outrage, traded for the thrill of callous speculation.

This is not to dismiss legitimate concerns. I know geoengineering is a contentious topic among many of my readers—and the debate is gaining traction, edging into mainstream mention. Earlier this month, Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a federal bill—backed by RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement—to criminalize unauthorized weather modification and climate engineering in the United States.

Regardless of what we believe about engineered weather, the flood in Texas revealed something terrible about our instincts: how quickly, in the face of grief, we search for theories to make sense of the senseless. We’ve been doing it since biblical times. When systems fail, tragedy becomes a gateway for speculation, even when it’s not ours to spin.

The reality is that grim fate is often not explainable.

Fifty lives were lost in Texas. School-aged girls went to bed happily exhausted from a day of crafts and worship, of singing and dancing beneath a blue Texas sky feeling safe, and woke to a violent surge of water that not all would escape.

How difficult is it to let the tragedy breathe, uninterrupted by distortion?

As the town mourns, community members are rising in the wake of horror to feed their own. News of their actions appear in my DMs. They are aiding rescue workers, gathering at elementary schools repurposed as funeral homes, sharing updates on missing children, comforting survivors, and combing the riverbanks for any last signs of life.

Navigating the aftermath of a nightmare in real time. Prayers and support from the rest of the country is not too much to ask.