Del Mar Skate Ranch was designed by Tom Inouye, Chris Strople, and Curtis Hesselgrave of IPS (Inouye's Pool Service), who understood what made skateable concrete work. The park's layout included a 12,000-square-foot snake run — a winding, banked channel that allowed continuous carving at speed — and a series of pools and bowls in the back section. The Keyhole pool, named for its shape, was a combination of a round bowl and an oval extension, with coping and transitions calibrated for the kind of aerial skating that was then emerging as a distinct discipline. An eleven-foot full pipe ran through the park. The design was ambitious for the late 1970s, when skateparks were still a relatively new phenomenon and the relationship between pool skating, ramp skating, and what was then called 'freestyle' was still being worked out on concrete by the people inventing it.

Del Mar Skate Ranch drew the best skaters in Southern California and became a competition venue that attracted talent nationally. Tony Hawk, growing up in San Diego, skated Del Mar from childhood and used the park's facilities to develop the aerial maneuvers that would define his career. Rodney Mullen, who would systematize the flatground tricks that became the basis of modern street skating, skated Del Mar competitively. Steve Caballero, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain: the names associated with the park's competitive history map roughly onto the names associated with the Bones Brigade, the Powell Peralta team that defined a generation of skateboarding. The park hosted contests organized by the National Skateboard Association that were among the most consequential competitions of the era.

The Del Mar Skate Ranch appears in several skateboarding films of the era, including the Powell Peralta productions that documented the Bones Brigade. These films — The Bones Brigade Video Show, Future Primitive, and others — were not commercially distributed in theaters; they were sold through skateboard shops and passed around among skaters. They documented the tricks being invented at Del Mar and similar venues and spread those innovations across the country and eventually the world. The visual language of skateboarding — the camera angles, the editing rhythm, the way progression was documented — was developed substantially through footage shot at parks like Del Mar. The ranch served as both performance venue and production studio for a form of filmmaking that had no established precedents.

The Del Mar Skate Ranch closed in July 1987 when its lease expired and the site was slated for hotel development. The hotel was never built. The concrete was broken up and removed. The parking lot where skaters had spent nine years developing new possibilities in the sport became ordinary ground again. Tony Hawk has spoken about the loss of Del Mar as a significant one. Danny Way, who grew up skating there and went on to set records for biggest gaps and highest aerials in skateboarding, also traces his development to the park. The Del Mar Fairgrounds, which sits adjacent to where the ranch was, continues to host the annual San Diego County Fair and the summer thoroughbred racing meet. The parking lots around it have no memorial to what was once there.