In 2020, the Arizona monsoon season turned deadly when a powerful storm hit Apache Lake.
The monsoon hit the burn scar from the Woodbury Fire the year before — and created an avalanche of debris that rushed down on a group of boaters who had sheltered in a cove from the storm.
The deluge took two lives that day: Deanna Peterson and Rick Le Grand.
Ryan Schuster was there when it happened and is out now with a new book about the tragedy. It’s called "Follow the Noise: A Saga of Fire and Flood in the Arizona Desert and the Scars Left Behind."
In it, Schuster grapples with not just the flood that took his friends, but his family’s story of legacy and loss on Apache Lake. They owned the Apache Lake Marina and Resort for more than 40 years but had to sell it in the aftermath of the Woodbury Fire.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: You start the book with Rick Le Grand and what happened to him in the summer of 2020. So I want to start the conversation there. Tell us first just like a little bit about him. Like this was a guy who loved Apache Lake, who was part of that community.
RYAN SCHUSTER: Rick was really larger than life at Apache Lake. I mean, he was born a boater. He grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and started visiting Apache Lake in the early ’70s and really never stopped coming. And really just kind of built that reputation of being a boater, but I’d say more importantly like an appreciator. He appreciated the good times, whether it was hanging out with all of his friends or parking his boat beneath some towering monolith of rock and just admiring the beauty of it all. So he was a really great appreciator of the world.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, and he loved that place. So on August 22, 2020, this flash flood hits the lake. There’s only kind of one way in and out. And you recreate this: Rick and his girlfriend going there that day, being excited, having fun. They’re in their swimsuits. And then this flood happens. Tell us about that. You were there too that day. What do you remember about that flood?
RYAN SCHUSTER: Yeah, well, before the flood, I mean, I think it’s really important just to remember the day in its entirety, and it was just denoted by beauty and great memories. I mean, we had just a wonderful day out on the water. It had been so long since all of us friends were able to hang out with each other. The road to Apache Lake had been closed for quite some time, so we had just recently kind of regained partial access to the lake and enjoyed everything from having just amazing meals out on the water and going wakeboarding and admiring the sunset together as well.
But what had happened was we saw a monsoon gathering steam out towards the east, which was back towards the resort where we needed to go back that night. And it came barreling down the lake, and ultimately we had to seek shelter in the nearest cove and just wait for the storm to pass us by.
LAUREN GILGER: While you were still on the water, yeah.
RYAN SCHUSTER: Yeah, so we’re still on the water, we’re on the boat, and we duck into this cove and it’s perfect. The wind dies down, it’s no longer raining, it’s just absolutely beautiful outside. But what we didn’t realize was the storm was gathering up in the mountains above us, and these are the mountains of Four Peaks, so 4,000 feet above lake level is where the storm was really drawn into. And it was centering over a burn scar of the latest wildfire that had ripped through, the Bush Fire in 2020.
So as these storms are centering over this region, it’s raining down a historic amount of water just in this one specific spot. And when wildfires burn through any sort of terrain, it’s really common for high-temperature burning fires to turn the soil actually hydrophobic. ... So the soil, when it’s getting rained on, it’s actually repelling the water. And the water collectively gathered up in these mountains and basically just shot straight down this mountain, kind of like a bullet train.
And it was over a burn scar, so it’s collecting all this debris, ash, mud, everything like that, all the way down. So ultimately what was occurring was a debris flow. The difference between a debris flow and a flash flood is debris flows are just liquefied enough to flow. They’re almost more solid than liquid. So they move with incredibly fast speeds.
So as we think we’re shielding ourselves away from the storm in the cove, but then ultimately what happens is this debris flow comes barreling out of the mountains, catches us dead in the water, the boat won’t start, and ultimately we had to face this flood head on.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And that’s where you lost Rick.
RYAN SCHUSTER: Yeah, so what had happened is, as this flood comes into our boats, the debris, the muck is pouring over the boat, over our heads. I mean, it’s complete chaos in the boats. And during that time, Rick had really just prioritized getting out life jackets to everyone that was on the boat and kind of directing them out towards safety.
And I had escaped off the side, following Rick’s directions, into this cove that was just filled with debris. So you’re crawling over the top of the water, out away from the boat. And when I looked back, I saw that the boat was capsized, it’s completely turned over, and all of our friends on board were missing.
LAUREN GILGER: I mean, so this was like an incredibly traumatic moment for you, I’m sure, and for everyone there. What do you — when you think back to that day, like what do you wish you had known?
RYAN SCHUSTER: I think that’s a really important question. We were all aware of the dangers of flash flooding. We’ve all grown up in Arizona and have heard countless stories of the wash that can turn into a river in a few moments’ time. But I don’t think we ever really appreciated or respected the scale of what the world can really bring down on you in a moment’s instant.
We all grew up on the water together, and over time you build this confidence where you’ve made it through storms together, you’ve made it through boats breaking down, everything like that, so you build this confidence that makes you feel like kind of like a professional of the waterway or just the outdoors in general. But you’re never really truly tested, and the moment that it tested all of us was something that we can never get back.
So I wish that we had just appreciated the gravity of what was happening around us, and it’s hard to say be better prepared because I’m not really sure how we could have prepared for it. But I think the ultimate answer is to not immerse yourself in these really fragile environments.
LAUREN GILGER: I think that’s interesting you call it a fragile environment, right? Because you talked about the reason that flash flood turned into such a dangerous moment, and it was because of this wildfire that had come before. And you talk in the book about the way that the lake and the region in general is really being shaped by flood and fire, right? Like this almost like biblical thing. And it’s increasing with climate change, right?
RYAN SCHUSTER: That’s right. I would argue the entire world is increasingly being shaped by fire and flood. This was just one particular moment in time, but as we’ve seen, we’re entering monsoon season, we’re also entering wildfire season as well. And sometimes those two might help cancel each other out, or sometimes they might combine to really unleash more devastation than they could individually.
So it’s something that I think all of our communities have had to grapple with more so over the years. In this instance, in Apache Lake, I characterize it as being encircled by fires. We had the fifth-largest wildfire in Arizona history that reached the southern border of the lake, then we had the Bush Fire the next year, which had come in on the northern boundaries of the lake.
But in other parts of the world, they don’t have the choice of being able to visit or not visit one of these places. Their entire communities or villages at the foothills of mountains that burn and then flood, where they really have no other option, nowhere else to go.
So this story impacted our small little local community, but I think we see these everyone’s different stories coming up over the years as this proliferation of wildfires continue that I think is reshaping how everyone’s viewing the world and its fragility that’s coming as an outcome of climate change.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, so I want to back up and talk about what this place means to you personally and to your family. The marina at Apache Lake your family owned and operated for more than four decades.
When this happened, it was up for sale because the fire had hit the region so hard that the road was closed for a long time, your family said we can’t do it anymore. You put it up for sale and eventually have sold it since then. But talk a little bit about growing up there. What do you remember about this place before all of this tragedy?
RYAN SCHUSTER: Yeah, I have the fondest memories of Apache Lake. Our family’s connection to that place runs so deep. Our grandparents purchased the resort in 1974, and during that time, my mom and her siblings were teenagers, so they came into it really without a choice, but they had already kind of been set in their ways and raised very differently.
My cousins and I, so I’m one of five cousins that all grew up at the lake, we were born and raised at Apache Lake, and all of our life’s core memories are based there. We learned to swim there in the water, we all had our first jobs there as early as 5 years old, and —
LAUREN GILGER: You started helping out, yeah.
RYAN SCHUSTER: Yeah, selling bags of ice at the ice house when I was around 5 years old, and we continued working there through college. So we’ve spent countless hours there, and I think we were really fortunate on the surface level, so lucky being raised in this incredible place on a lake in the beautiful Tonto National Forest, in the desert that surrounds.
But also just so fortunate to have the opportunity to start working and kind of learn the values of hard work and also of community at a really young age as well, that I don’t think we would have been exposed to in what we would call town life.
LAUREN GILGER: Town life, I like that. You must have been — you’re selling bags of ice, but you grew up on boats out there then, like swimming in the water. I mean, this was — how different is it now that you go up there than it was when you were growing up there?
RYAN SCHUSTER: It’s completely different for all of our family. My mom, for example, hasn’t returned there for leisure, to have fun, really. The rest of us cousins do still like to get up there and go boating and try and rekindle the magic of the place.
It just lives in different forms now. I think what we’ve all tried to be really cognizant about is be more of an appreciator, like Rick, and appreciate a lot of the really small things that we didn’t really pick up on when we were younger and kind of just barreling down the lake loud and fast. Now it’s a lot more slower speeds, appreciating rock formations and special little secret coves that can only fit one boat at a time.
LAUREN GILGER: Is it therapeutic to go out on a boat on that lake now after this tragedy happened, after you were there in this really terrible moment?
RYAN SCHUSTER: It is therapeutic. What I think has really helped me following this incident was immersion in the waters of Apache Lake. We always like to joke that it has healing waters whenever we had a cut or something like that, which I’m sure is definitely not the case.
But a couple days after the incident, we were all just really hanging around in this fog, and there was still smoke in the area from another fire that lingered off in the distance, kind of wallowing in our sadness. And my mom instructed us to go down to the beach, so that’s what we did, and kind of slowly lowered ourselves back into the lake that had taken our friends, that still held them as search and rescue efforts were ongoing.
And it felt right, and it still feels right to get back in that water. And I think it’s helped me to trust the natural world again and to reconcile with the fact that what the world brought down on us was so violent and powerful and terrifying, but at the same time it can offer peace, serenity, healing. And I think that’s really important to keep in mind when you want to become distrustful of the world, and you want to find a root cause to blame.
And in the end, it just all goes back to respecting the world and the powers that it’s capable of and ultimately what can happen as mankind continues to attempt to bend it and shape it to its will. And ultimately there’s no machine that can outlast the powers that the world can unleash on us.
LAUREN GILGER: So why did you write this book?
RYAN SCHUSTER: Well, I wrote this book really because I had all of these thoughts swirling around in my head years after the event. I felt my memories and the facts and order of events slowly start to fade away, and that really scared me. I’ve never been much of a storyteller, to be honest, at least not verbally in person, and it was always such a drain to find that space to tell this story to people that wanted to know. And rightfully so, a lot of people wanted to understand what had happened.
So I set out to really just capture all of the facts and talk with everyone else involved in order to ensure my memories were even correct and that our order of events was accurate. That’s what it started with.
As I found myself progressing, I found myself wanting to pull in the history of the Superstition Mountains and the Apache Trail and the damming of the Salt River to create the Salt River chain of lakes, because it’s all connected, it all works together. Damming this river is ultimately why a flood like this had nowhere to go because it met this static force at the bottom of this flume that it was traveling down.
I wanted to chronicle my family’s history with the region as well, especially since the resort had to sell. It was just such a crucial part of our life that I wanted it to live on, most importantly in some sort of physical form, so that’s why it was really important to bring this book to life in the real world.
LAUREN GILGER: You can hold it in your hands now, OK.
RYAN SCHUSTER: Very powerful.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, it is. All right, we’ll leave it there. Ryan Schuster, author of the new book, "Follow the Noise." Ryan, thank you very much for coming in. Thanks for telling us your story.
RYAN SCHUSTER: Thank you, Lauren.
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