San Dimas Kept Its Water Park. Sacramento and San Jose Lost Theirs.

On August 21, 2026, with another heat wave sitting over the San Gabriel Valley, Raging Waters in San Dimas started giving away lunch. Anyone who showed up through August 28 got 40 percent off admission and a free meal, chicken tenders or a hot dog or a personal pizza, with a soda thrown in. It was the kind of promotion a water park runs when it wants a packed parking lot on a Tuesday. Nothing about it suggested a business in flux.

And yet by the time that deal ran, the park had changed corporate owners twice in the previous sixteen months. Palace Entertainment, which had operated it for years, handed it to Herschend Family Entertainment in the spring of 2025. Herschend held it for about two months before selling it, along with four other properties, to Lucky Strike Entertainment in July 2025. Two sales, one calendar year, same 60-acre park on Raging Waters Drive that's been running since 1983.

That pace of ownership turnover is usually a warning sign in the leisure business, not background noise. It's the kind of pattern that precedes deferred maintenance, quiet closures, or a park limping through one more season before the land gets sold for something else. Two other locations that used to carry the exact same Raging Waters name went through something close to that script, and neither one is open today.

Two Parks With the Same Name, Two Different Endings

Raging Waters Sacramento, at Cal Expo, closed after the 2022 season. The plan on paper was a full refurbishment: Silverwood Entertainment took over the site in 2023 with a three-year rebuild timeline, a new name, "Calibunga," and a year-round restaurant called Cal Soleil built into the concept. By February 2026, the developer had missed lease payments and the project fell apart. Cal Expo is now looking at other partners for the site, and even in the best case, permitting and construction put a reopening years out. For 2026, there is no water park at Cal Expo, full stop.

Raging Waters San Jose, at Lake Cunningham Park, had already gone quiet before that. It opened in 1985 and was the largest water park in Northern California at the time. In September 2023, the operators announced it would not reopen for the 2024 season. It hasn't since.

Here's how the three flagship-era locations line up right now:

Same brand, same era of construction, same basic business. Only one of the three is still selling tickets.

What Actually Changed Hands

The difference isn't that San Dimas avoided ownership churn. It's what kind of deal that churn actually was. Sacramento's plan depended on a developer building something new on leased fairground land and making good on lease payments tied to a promise that hadn't been built yet. When the payments stopped, the project stopped with them, and Cal Expo was left holding a demolished water park and no replacement.

San Dimas never went through that kind of leasehold gamble. Both 2025 sales were straightforward acquisitions of a park that was already open, already selling tickets, already pulling in an estimated 450,000 visitors a year according to the acquisition announcement. When Lucky Strike Entertainment bought it in July 2025, the deal included four other operating properties in the same transaction, Wet 'n Wild Emerald Pointe in Greensboro, Castle Park in Riverside, and two Boomers locations in Vista and Palm Springs. The company framed the purchase around expanding a network of venues that were already generating revenue, not rescuing or rebuilding one.

That's the distinction worth knowing if you live anywhere near Puddingstone. A park that gets bought as a working asset behaves very differently than one that gets bought as a redevelopment bet. One of those categories is where Cal Expo's water park ended up. The other is where San Dimas's has stayed.

What Didn't Change This Season

The 2026 season opened May 9 on the same schedule the park has run for years, and it ran through the standard May-to-September window before that August closing date got pushed to October 18. Single-day tickets held at $59.99 online, $74.99 at the gate, with an "Any Day" ticket at $64.99 that works for any operating day in the season. Seniors and military members still get their usual discounts. The ride lineup that's defined the park for decades is still the draw: the Aqua Rocket water coaster, the Dark Hole tunnel slide, Neptune's Fury, the Bombs Away trapdoor slides added in 2023, Kid's Kingdom for younger visitors, the Wave Cove wave pool, and the Amazon Adventure lazy river.

USA Today ranked it seventh on this year's list of the best outdoor water parks in the country. The park is still the same one that stood in for a water park in 1989's Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and turned up in scenes from 1988's The Wizard, trivia that's been true since before either buyer was in the picture. Season passes for 2027 are already on sale, which shows the park is planning for future seasons.

What This Means If You're Nearby

If you live close enough to Puddingstone that Raging Waters shows up in your daily routine, the question that actually matters isn't who owns the park this year. It's whether that ownership looks anything like the kind that preceded Sacramento's demolition or San Jose's closure, now stretching into its third season with no reopening in sight. Right now, it doesn't. There's no lease-dependent redevelopment plan attached to the San Dimas site, no missed payment story, no announcement about the land's future use. It's privately owned by a company that just bought four other working venues in the same transaction and is already selling next year's passes.

None of that guarantees anything about 2030 or 2035. Businesses change plans. But the specific failure pattern that took down two sister parks under the same name isn't the pattern playing out here, and that's a distinction worth having if the subject comes up at a barbecue near Frank G. Bonelli Regional Park, which sits right next to the water park and has its own recent history worth knowing.

Understanding what's actually happening in a neighborhood, not just what shows up in a listing description, is the kind of local detail Maureen Haney and her team track across Glendora, La Verne, and San Dimas. If you're curious what else has shifted in San Dimas this year or want a straight read on what a specific property's location actually means day to day, reach out for a conversation grounded in what's really going on around here.