WACO, Texas (KWTX) – 14-year-old twins from Waco who were both rescued when their neighboring summer camps were overtaken by deadly flash flooding on the Guadalupe River on July 4th say they’re thankful to still have one another while also grieving the loss of so many.
Clara and Nolan Shelton are speaking in detail for the first time about the nightmare that unfolded when an overnight storm sent river levels rising nearly 30 feet in an hour at their summer camps located just six miles apart in the Texas Hill Country.
More than 100 people have now been confirmed dead including 27 campers and staff from Camp Mystic, where Clara was camping.
Nearly 175 others remain missing.
Clara has been a “Mystic Girl” since 2021, following in the footsteps of her mother, Suzanne, who camped at the storied summer getaway in 1991 and 1992.
“My whole childhood is Mystic. I love that camp,” Clara said. “It’s my home away from home and I love the owners, the Eastlands, like my own family.”
It’s that same feeling of familiarity and comfort her twin brother, Nolan, had about Camp La Junta, an all-boys camp he attended for eight summers just downstream from Mystic.
Both were just a couple days into a month-long session this past week when a flash flood hit that quickly turned deadly.
With no cell phones, power or any way to communicate, the twins spent hours wondering if the other was still alive.
“I thought she died,” Nolan told KWTX in his first interview since the ordeal. “I thought she was dead. I was really scared.”
“He’s my best friend,” Clara said. “He was truly the only person on my mind.”
PHOTO GALLERY: Clara and Nolan Shelton throughout the years
Clara’s Camp Mystic experienced the most tragedy with 27 campers and staff losing their lives and others still unaccounted for.
Nolan’s Camp La Junta fortunately had no deaths, but the water was so strong, it sent cabins floating down the river and boys climbing to cabin rafters to survive.
When the storm rolled in, Clara, who had fallen ill the day before, was sleeping in the nurse’s station located on higher ground at Mystic.
Nolan was fast asleep in his cabin which was also located on higher ground at La Junta.
Neither had any idea that the rainstorm which awoken them both was anything more than typical.
“We woke up at like 2 a.m. and our cabin was getting filled with some water,” Nolan recalled. “But, our cabin was at a high point and was a safe point but the water just kept coming in from multiple areas.”
Thinking it was nothing more than a summer storm, Nolan and his cabinmates went back to sleep.
Meanwhile at Camp Mystic, Clara woke up to the sound of thunder and counselors and staff talking in the nurse’s station.
Campers belongings sit outside one of Camp Mystic’s cabins near the Guadalupe River, Monday, July 7, 2025, in Hunt, Texas, after a flash flood swept through the area.(Eli Hartman | AP Photo/Eli Hartman)
She’s not certain of the time because campers are not allowed cell phones and she had no watch, but she estimates it was around 2 or 3 a.m.
“A counselor came in and said ‘the cabin is flooding. It’s going through the closet. It’s coming in really fast.’ I thought it would be an ordinary loud thunderstorm. I never thought it would succumb to the level it did,” Clara said.
By around 4 a.m., Clara recalls Camp Director Britt Eastland coming in to talk.
The staff wasn’t talking directly to her, but Clara says she could hear enough to know the situation was becoming serious.
Britt is the son of Mystic owner Dick Eastland who later died trying to evacuate girls.
“Throughout the night, we continue to hear people on the radio about getting the girls up and onto the roof and about 4 a.m. we lost all power and all water,” Clara said.
Clara said she still didn’t understand the severity of the situation until about 7 a.m. when she made her way to James Hall, a dining hall on higher ground where campers were being evacuated.
“I saw all the little girls wrapped up in blankets, throwing up off the side of the porch. I saw a lot. It was truly a tragedy,” she recalled.
“That’s when the nurses and I went up to James Hall to go help all the kids that were sick and throwing up and help get them food and clothes and really just take care of them. There were coloring sheets.”
“I put a few BAND-AIDS on some kids, and I held the kids whenever they were crying. I comforted them. There was a girl really, really sick, a girl in our cabin and we were all helping her.”
Over at La Junta, Nolan had woken up at his normal time of 7 a.m. only to find out the overnight storm was anything but typical.
Cabins were completely washed out and the stories were being shared of boys having to climb to the tops of rafters to survive the rising water.
Nolan also had no cell phone or watch so his times are also estimates.
“We woke up around 7 a.m. learning that the whole camp was really bad,” Nolan said. “We saw the lake and the cabins and so much was destroyed. It was really bad. Cabins were getting filled with water and fish.”
Nolan was told campers at his camp were all accounted for, but stories began to circulate of the devastation at nearby Camp Mystic.
All Nolan could think about was Clara.
“At the time, there were like 13 confirmed deaths, and no one knew the people and I was scared she was one of them,” he said.
Back in Waco, the twins’ parents, Dain and Suzanne, first got word of a threatening storm in a text from Camp La Junta just before 7 a.m. By the time they were alerted of the threat, La Junta had told them all campers there were safe.
A little before 10 a.m., they received an email from Camp Mystic.
“They sent out an email that said ‘if you have not been contacted directly, your daughter is accounted for and safe,” Suzanne said.
Suzanne and Dain had not been contacted so they assumed Clara was safe.
The Sheltons headed straight for the Hill Country first stopping at First Presbyterian Church of Kerrville where La Junta was busing the boys.
Nolan arrived first at around 7:30 p.m.
He hugged his parents who told them they believed Clara was okay.
The Sheltons then went to Ingram Elementary to await Clara’s bus.
By around 5 p.m., Clara estimates, she started seeing helicopters landing on buildings on campgrounds.
She thinks she began her evacuation around 7:30 p.m. and says she took multiple forms of transportation.
“This truck/boat thing — we were in the bed of it,” Clara said. “There were trucks, but they also had boats trailered on the back of them. I road in a boat in the trailer and then we got put in the army trucks and then we got on buses at the high school.”
PHOTOS: Victims killed in Texas Hill Country Flooding
As Clara left the campgrounds, the severity hit her fast and hard.
“Nobody really had any clue until we were evacuated and saw the destruction and the first responders rescuing people out of the water, those who did make it and those who didn’t make it,” Clara recalled as her voice cracked.
The details of what she saw were so painful, Clara didn’t want to expand.
She said another unsettling moment came when her bus passed by her brother’s camp that she boasted she “knew like the back of her hand.”
She said she no longer recognized it.
“When I drove by my brother’s camp, I truly had convinced myself that I would never get to see my brother again. It was probably one of the scariest moments of my life.”
Clara began to sing hymns alongside her fellow campers on the bus as they passed Camp La Junta.
A Mystic camp nurse filmed it and posted it online.
When Suzanne watched the now viral video she immediately recognized Clara’s brunette low bun from behind and she heard her voice.
“I felt truly connected with the girls around me and in my faith and I felt that it was just a moment where we could remember all the girls that we lost and really just take a moment for them and it also helped calm down a lot of the girls around us to be able to hear the voices,” Clara said.
Suzanne, Dain and Nolan were anxiously awaiting Clara’s arrival to the school which was the reunification center for Mystic parents.
Suzanne knew she was one of the lucky ones as other parents there had no word on if their children had survived.
“Your heart just broke for them,” Suzanne said. “When your daughter’s name is up on the screen and headed there and they don’t even know if theirs is alive or found. It’s pretty horrific.”
Clara stepped off the bus but wasn’t able to hug her family until she passed through several checkpoints, some for positive identification and others for mental health checks.
The first person she spotted was Nolan.
“I was bawling my eyes out because I truly did think Nolan was gone. I was so relieved when the first person I saw standing in front of the bus whenever I stepped off the bus at the elementary school was my brother without a scratch,” Clara said.
When Clara was released, she first hugged her mom before running into the arms of her twin.
“I remember my dad and my brother standing behind her and as soon as I saw my brother my dad thought I was coming to him, but I ran and hugged my brother and cried in his shoulder,” Clara said. “I’ve never felt more love from my brother than I did in that moment.”
“I was so relived to see her and that she was okay that I almost cried and I never cry,” Nolan told KWTX.
The twins, while thankful to be alive, are quick to acknowledge the pain so many others are experiencing who weren’t as fortunate.
They carry with them extreme sadness and guilt, they say.
Clara had just had a sweet conversation with one of the young campers now confirmed dead just the day before while both were out fishing.
“Survivor’s guilt is a real thing,” Clara said. “I just wish I could have done something more to save people.”
This was Nolan’s last year to camp at La Junta before he aged out.
Suzanne and Clara, meanwhile, plan to return to Camp Mystic this weekend to gather Clara’s belongings and meet with cabinmates.
They’ll also pick up Nolan’s things at his camp.
Clara says she has mixed emotions about returning to Camp Mystic this weekend and doesn’t think she’d ever have it in her to return as a camper to the place she once called her “home away from home” if or when it ever reopens.
For now, Clara says, she’s focused on the grieving families and remembering a camp that meant so much to so many.
“I just want to remember all the good memories I had there, ” Clara said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.”
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