Days after floodwaters swept through Camp Mystic and other parts of Central Texas, rescuers recovered the body of camper, Virginia Hollis.

Blakely McCrory, an 8-year-old from Bellaire, wrote her mom a letter from Camp Mystic before she died in the July 4 flood.

Camp Mystic successfully appealed to remove several structures from a FEMA flood zone, despite being located in a high-risk flood area in Texas Hill Country.

For decades, Dick and Tweety Eastland presided over Camp Mystic with a kind of magisterial benevolence that alumni well past childhood still describe with awe.

For grieving communities, the kinds of public memorials familiar from history — stone cenotaphs, bronze monuments and statues — feel inadequate to the demands of the present. Implacable and stolid, they can seem more about their own physical grandeur than the lives they honor.

Colorado summer camp directors are well aware of the threat natural disasters like a wildfire or flood could mean for campers.

When Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp for girls nestled in Texas Hill Country, experienced catastrophic flooding on July 4, Executive Director Richard “Dick” Eastland worked to get his campers to