Graffiti News

An abandoned water park in California's Mojave Desert is being looked at again. The New York Post reported on 17 August 2026 that archival footage of Lake Dolores Waterpark in Newberry Springs had spread online. The Post describes the site as America's first water park and says it is now full of rubble and graffiti.

What went viral

Brian Roemmele posted an old news programme clip of the park to X on 14 August 2026. The footage shows swimmers on zip lines, people hurling themselves down slides and lying around the lake, and an interview with the then-owner walking a television crew through the property. "It was another time and it was another place," Roemmele wrote. "Unabashed California culture that is long gone."

The replies filled with nostalgia. Among the responses quoted by the New York Post: "We need [to] bring back this type of California energy," and "Holy smokes I remember this place!! My teenage years were spent in Barstow."

What Lake Dolores was

According to the New York Post, Lake Dolores Waterpark was created nearly 65 years ago on a site of more than 250 acres. It sat right off Interstate 15, deep in the Mojave, remote enough that kids drove hundreds of miles across California to reach it.

The park was built by Bob Byers, a local in Newberry Springs, and named after his wife. Water came from underground springs fed by the Mojave Aquifer, pumped up to fill the lake and the attractions.

There were ten waterslides in total: eight identical 150-foot slides running off a man-made hill, and two V-shaped slides of about the same length that riders took standing up. A zip-cord ride carried people on a hand-held device attached to a guide wire, roughly 200 feet above the water on a 30-degree downward angle. The park also had a lazy river, bumper boats, a go-kart track, diving boards and the lake itself.

What is left

The park was deserted in 2004 after three failed attempts to revive it, the New York Post reports. What drivers see now is an abandoned site. The slides are filled with dust and grime and have been untouched for years, and the entrance sign that once announced the park is covered in graffiti.

Ruins are the unofficial galleries of graffiti

Abandoned facilities collect more paint than almost any other kind of site, and the reason is unglamorous: the walls are still standing, nobody buffs them, and nothing gets repainted. A piece in a city centre may last days. A piece in a desert ruin can last years.

What it does not get is an audience. The visitors are photographers and passing traffic, which changes how the work behaves. In a city, position and visibility decide whether a piece is seen. In a ruin, layering decides what the wall becomes: different people write over the same surface across years, and sun, wind and sand strip it back. The curator is the weather.

Lake Dolores is a clear example of a ruin holding two records at once. Roemmele's clip shows the site full of people. Current photographs of the same structures show two decades of marks left after everyone stopped coming. That doubling is a large part of why ruin photography keeps circulating: the place shows its original purpose and everything that happened afterwards in the same frame.

If you are thinking about photographing a ruin

Lake Dolores is closed private property. Entering it is trespassing, and collapsed structures, exposed rebar and desert heat are real hazards. Wallscape does not encourage trespassing or unauthorised painting. Sites like this are best documented from the road and through photography that has already been published, which is usually enough.

For graffiti closer to home, Wallscape's map shows locations people have already logged and the feed shows what has been added recently. If a wall is legally accessible, a photograph and a location are all it takes to keep a record of it.

Source: New York Post, 17 August 2026. Current-condition photographs credited to Jam Press / Raise the Stakes Photography.