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#Post#: 334846--------------------------------------------------
19-year-old Camp Mystic counselor lead her 16 campers to safety
through the flood
DIR By: kkt
Date: July 12, 2025, 7:20 pm
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In the dark, amid screams, a Camp Mystic counselor had 16 girls
and one headlamp
gift link:
HTML https://wapo.st/44pck4q
As the Texas floodwaters rushed into their cabins, the teen
counselors braved the unknown.
Today (12 July 2025) at 6:00 a.m. EDT
By John Woodrow Cox
--- Quote ---
> The first drops of rain had yet to fall when Ainslie Bashara,
a counselor at Camp Mystic, noticed that one of the younger
girls had begun to tear up. They were walking back to their
cabin, Giggle Box, as another storm swelled over the Texas Hill
Country. The girl feared what was coming, so Ainslie wrapped an
arm around her.
> “It’s just heat lightning,” Ainslie, 19, recalled assuring her
that evening. “There’s nothing to it.”
> It was just past 9 p.m. on July 3, the start of Ainslie’s
night off from tending to Giggle Box’s 16 “littles.” She popped
inside to grab her backpack just as the girls, all between 8 and
10, began to brush their teeth and slip on their pajamas.
Ainslie said goodbye and headed out for a break with friends. By
the time she came back, shortly after midnight, she had to
sprint. The storm had begun to pound the 99-year-old Christian
camp situated along the Guadalupe River. The cabin was no more
than 600 feet from the bank.
--- End Quote ---
(story continues. Tearjerker.)
Ainslie is a hero. However, she doesn't blame the camp at all!
I do. A couple of summers, I spent a couple of weeks at a time
in a wilderness camp in California's Trinity Alps. (Weaverville
was the nearest town, for any of you wondering about California
geography, but Weaverville isn't much of a town unless you like
bars.) The camp was a wilderness area. It was possible for a
high-clearance vehicle to drive to the camp, but they only did
that bringing in the food for the summer and major equipment
like tent poles. Campus got a couple of Greyhound busses from
the S.F. Bay Area where we were from to the last point on a dirt
road where it was possible to turn around a Greyhound, and we
hiked the last 2-3 miles to camp the first day.
It was a wilderness area: no electronics allowed, campers' only
communication was families or the outside world was letters, and
they would take about half the length of a camp session anyway.
This was before cell phones and even now there's probably no
reception, but they DID have a 2-way radio in the office and
they checked in daily with the outside world. It was also
available to call for an ambulance if one of our campers was
seriously sick or injured, past the ability of the camp nurse to
care for. They did check the weather report, even though
summers were almost always a parade of fair and sunny, day after
day, in summer. They could have curtailed aspects of the camp
if flooding was in the forecast, as it was in Texas. I would
have expected a camp in a river floodplain with a history of
serious floods to do at least as much to keep their campers
safe.
#Post#: 334849--------------------------------------------------
Re: 19-year-old Camp Mystic counselor lead her 16 campers to
safety through the flood
DIR By: MidwestmikkiJ
Date: July 12, 2025, 8:30 pm
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The NYT this morning had an article that showed how the cabins
and buildings gs were situated and how the terrain changed
within the camp. I hope things change to make those camps safer.
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