Closed Southern California waterpark off I-15 may see comeback
You might know it as Lake Dolores, or Rock-A-Hoola Water Park or Discovery Water Park.
But whatever you know it as, you’ve likely seen it if you’ve driven on Interstate 15 near Barstow, California, in the last 50 years.
And after sitting empty for two decades, you might even get to experience it again.
‘An old fashioned swimming hole’
The closed water park 130 miles south of Las Vegas opened as Lake Dolores in the 1960s, named after one of its co-founders, Dolores Byers, according to Review-Journal archives.
Before the lake, Dolores and Bob Byers grew alfalfa at the property throughout the 1950s before converting the land into an amusement park.
In its heyday, the park included eight lakes, 10 water slides and 30-foot trapeze swings on the 300-acre property to help keep people cool in the Mojave Desert.
“We have an old-fashioned swimming hole,” Bob Byers told the Review-Journal in 1989. “You have to have a little country in you to enjoy this.”
Byers claimed his park had “the fastest slides around,” with eight of the 10 slides over 200 feet tall.
The park closed the first time in 1987 after the Byers decided to retire, but because of popular demand, Lake Dolores was reopened in 1989.
Lake Dolores was renamed Rock-A-Hoola Water Park in 1996, but the park couldn’t seem to capture the same business as Lake Dolores did half a decade before.
And it wasn’t long before one of the “fastest slides around” caused even more problems for the park.
In 1999, a 23-year-old water park employee became paraplegic after going down the Doo Wop Super Drop slide. The employee, James Mason, told another employee to turn the slide on after the park had closed for the day. Mason went down the slide before its “runout lane” was full of water, and hit the dam at the end of the slide at a high speed, causing Mason to fly in the air and land on his back, according to court documents.
After suing the water park for negligence, a jury awarded Mason nearly $4.4 million, court records state.
The park’s name was changed again to Discovery Water Park in 2002, but still couldn’t find success under a rebranding. It closed in 2004, and has remained out-of-operation since.
Since its closure, the park has become a hub for graffiti artists and skateboarders.
Future plans for the park
But, Lake Dolores may make a return some time in the next few years.
A project to bring Lake Dolores back was approved by the San Bernardino County Board of Commissioners in March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and is slowly inching toward developing the property, according to county spokesman David Wert.
County planning commission documents for the project from 2018 say the developer, G&GF Enterprise, LLC, plans to develop the property in five total phases, starting with the revival of the park’s 22-acre lake and a 2-acre pond.
An RV park would be constructed in the park’s second phase of development, and the water park and a parking area would be built in the project’s third phase, documents state.
Documents also show a proposal for the park to open 89,730 square feet of office and administrative space in its fourth phase, followed by a proposed 45,727 square feet of commercial and retail space.
Plans also call for improving the I-15 interchange near the park site as part of a “cooperative agreement with the (project) applicant and the county,” Wert said in an email.
“The county does not know if the developer has a timeline in mind to begin and complete work on the project,” he said.
Contact Taylor Lane at tlane@reviewjournal.com.
