{"id":233591,"date":"2026-04-03T14:57:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T14:57:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/233591\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T14:57:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T14:57:13","slug":"inside-a-dallas-workshop-volunteers-help-rebuild-hill-country-summer-camp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/233591\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside a Dallas workshop, volunteers help rebuild Hill Country summer camp"},"content":{"rendered":"

Overnight, summer camps vanished. The Guadalupe River\u00a0swallowed camp trunks and T-shirts and tennis shoes and furniture and family photographs once taped to bunk beds.<\/p>\n

Camp La Junta<\/a> was fortunate. Every camper, counselor and staffer at the all-boys camp in Central Texas evacuated safely. Yet the physical camp was decimated. How do you rebuild an idyllic summer camp washed away by a flood?<\/p>\n

If you are Wayne Pritchard, you drive 40 minutes from your home in Kaufman County<\/a> to a workshop in Dallas, even as your friends question why you are not watching movies at home or playing golf. You pick up a drill and a sturdy plank of pristine red oak wood. You build bunk beds, piece by painstaking piece, for young campers and the ones who will come after them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve done a lot of fun things in my life, but nothing compares to this,\u201d Pritchard said. \u201cThe feeling we get knowing we are doing God\u2019s work is hard to describe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pritchard is\u00a075 years old, a grandfather and woodworker. After retiring from the automotive industry a\u00a0few years ago, he was looking for a way to stay busy and found Texans on Mission<\/a>, a Christian disaster relief organization based in Dallas.<\/p>\n

After the flood ravaged Hill Country<\/a> last year, killing some 140 people,\u00a0Pritchard deployed with other Dallas-area volunteers to Central Texas. The photographs and videos he saw beforehand did little to prepare him for the soggy homes with crumbling walls stained by mud and muck, the cars submerged in the river, the canoe tangled 30 feet high in a tree. Nothing made sense.<\/p>\n

Texans on Mission returned again and again to Hill Country to build homes, paint cabins, lay sod and remove downed tree limbs.<\/p>\n

\"Volunteer<\/p>\n

Volunteer Peter Biendit prepares bunk beds panels destined for Camp La Junta at a Texans on Mission woodworking shop in Dallas on Tuesday, March 31, 2026. (Jason Janik\/The Dallas Morning News)<\/p>\n

When the organization learned Camp La Junta<\/a> in the town of Hunt needed bunk beds, it offered to help. Typically, clients pay for the cost of materials, including lumber. In this case, Texans on Mission received enough donations to cover nearly the entire cost of 75 bunk beds. When Pritchard gave the camp the news, a staff member at La Junta began to cry. He told her she better stop because he might start crying.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one,\u201d he told her, \u201cneeds to see my cry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Camp La Junta plans to reopen in June, nearly one year after one of the deadliest floods in U.S. history. The camp has faced little, if any, pushback over reopening, in contrast to Camp Mystic, the all-girls camp where 27 girls and the camp\u2019s executive director died in the floods. One girl, Cile Steward, has yet to be found, and parents have sued to keep the camp from reopening this summer.<\/p>\n

Fifteen minutes up the river, Camp La Junta plans to host an open house in the coming weeks as it prepares to open.<\/p>\n

About 300 miles away in Dallas, volunteers meet at the open-air workshop off Samuell Boulevard<\/a> a few days each week and pray together. Like Pritchard, many volunteers are retired and looking to fill their days and do some good. Some have woodworking experience but others have never handled a drill. No experience is necessary, just a willingness to learn.<\/p>\n

\"Volunteer<\/p>\n

Volunteer Billye Rhudy sands bunk beds panels destined for Camp La Junta at a Texans on Mission woodworking shop in Dallas on Tuesday, March 31, 2026. (Jason Janik\/The Dallas Morning News)<\/p>\n

Each bed is built with nearly 50 pieces of wood, which must be measured, cut, sanded and treated so it does not break down in the humidity. At one point, a 250-pound volunteer tested out the top bunk. The frame barely budged.<\/p>\n

Some volunteers have their own memories of camp. Tony Tarpley, who lives in Red Oak, began volunteering with Texans on Mission shortly after retiring in 2018 from Bell Helicopter as a mechanical engineer. He went to work in the group\u2019s cabinet shop building furniture for churches devastated by tornadoes, a ministry for young Native Americans, a summer camp for physically handicapped children, and now, bunk beds for Camp La Junta.<\/p>\n

As a boy, Tarpley attended a Christian camp in the New Mexico desert. He is now 68, but he still remembers how his faith sprouted and grew at the camp in the red rocks.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think God designed us to just sit at home and be self-absorbed,\u201d Tarpley said. \u201cWe\u2019re building these beds to last not only this generation, but future generations of campers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Billye Rhudy, 66, drove two hours from her home in Gatesville, a small town near Waco, to Dallas to build bunk beds this week. After the floods, she helped run a shower and laundry facility in the Hill Country, where residents could get a free shower while volunteers laundered their clothes.<\/p>\n

This week, Rhudy, a retired mortician, sanded wooden boards until they were smooth enough that campers won\u2019t get splinters.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard work, and it\u2019s tedious,\u201d she said, \u201cbut it\u2019s the Lord\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nearby, Pritchard moved through the workshop, which he said is like its own little church. Volunteers loaded wooden planks onto a truck headed for Hill Country. Soon, the beds will be assembled side by side in new cabins, ready for campers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Overnight, summer camps vanished. The Guadalupe River\u00a0swallowed camp trunks and T-shirts and tennis shoes and furniture and family…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233592,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[90338,90336,102,104,10504,103,4178,79836,4036,4842,90337,90339],"class_list":["post-233591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-bunk-beds","tag-camp-la-junta","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-morning-news","tag-dallas-news","tag-hill-country","tag-summer-camp","tag-summer-camps","tag-texans","tag-wayne-pritchard","tag-woodworking-shop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}