Byers had been building the lake and its attractions through the 1950s and early 1960s — a private project that grew into something more substantial than any backyard pool. The man-made lake covered 273 acres, an implausible body of water in a landscape that receives only a few inches of rain a year. He added waterslides, facilities, and the infrastructure needed to welcome visitors. In its peak years, the park employed up to 70 people from the surrounding area.

By the standards of desert tourism, Lake Dolores was a genuine phenomenon. Families drove out from the Inland Empire and the Los Angeles basin to spend a day in water in the middle of nowhere, which was exactly what Byers had improbably made possible. The park operated for decades, becoming a fixture in a region that had very few of them.

The waterpark closed and reopened under the name Rock-A-Hoola on July 4, 1998 — a rebranding that tried to capture something louder and more nostalgic than the original name suggested. It was a reasonable bet. Waterparks were thriving elsewhere in California, and the site's isolation, once a liability, had become part of its character.

The second act didn't last. Rock-A-Hoola went bankrupt in 2000, and this time the closure was permanent. The rides stopped. The water drained. The desert, which had been kept at bay by maintenance crews and paying customers, began reasserting itself. What had been a working waterpark became something else entirely — a photogenic ruin where waterslides bleached in the sun and the empty lake bed cracked in the heat.

Abandoned places have a particular gravity for artists, and Lake Dolores proved irresistible. The Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada used the site for their 2013 Tomorrow's Harvest debut — the decaying waterpark's visual vocabulary of faded optimism and desert entropy fit the album's mood exactly. Olivia Rodrigo filmed there in 2020. A BTS music video brought the site to a global audience in 2022.

Harrison Ford used the adjacent Amboy Airfield — one of California's earliest airports — when he visited the area. Brad Pitt filmed scenes from Kalifornia nearby in 1993. The pattern suggests something: this stretch of desert, which the closure of Route 66 and then the opening of I-40 had effectively bypassed, had found a second life as a backdrop for stories about isolation, nostalgia, and the strange beauty of things left behind.

The waterslides still stand, their concrete and fiberglass weathered into soft grays and off-whites. The lake bed is dry. The facilities that once served thousands of visitors on summer weekends are empty. The park sits just off Interstate 15 — visible from the highway, accessible by those who seek it out, ignored by almost everyone else who passes.

It is a peculiar monument to ambition: one man built a lake in the desert for his family, opened it to the world, and created something that outlasted its usefulness by becoming beautiful in its abandonment. Bob Byers named it for his wife. The musicians who come here half a century later probably don't think about that. But the lake is still called Dolores.