Lake Arrowhead is located 13 miles north east of the San Bernardino city limits.

Tourism is the primary economic generator for the area, contributing several million dollars per year to the county and providing hundreds of full-time and part-time jobs for local residents.

The primary tourism industries include real estate, lodging, dining, recreation, and retail sales.

While Lake Arrowhead has no official town center, the Lake Arrowhead Village serves as the main commercial area for both locals and tourists and includes a number of factory outlets, boutiques, restaurants, two banks, a post office and a supermarket.

Other major employers include Mountains Community Hospital and Rim of the World Unified School District.

[5] Logging in the San Bernardino Mountains was once done on a large scale, with the Brookings Lumber Company operation one of the largest.

Finished lumber was hauled by wagon down the steep grades to the Molino Box Factory in Highland, California.

[6][7][8][9] Lake Arrowhead is located in the Inland Empire region of Southern California, about 20 minutes north of the San Bernardino city limits.

Outside of Lake Arrowhead Village there are several residential communities, which include Cedar Glen, Blue Jay, Rimforest, Skyforest, Twin Peaks, Crest Park, Hook Creek Tract, Deer Lodge Park, Arrowhead Villas, Grass Valley, and Agua Fria.

According to the 2010 United States Census, Lake Arrowhead had a median household income of $57,672, with 11.2% of the population living below the federal poverty line.

[19] The Lake Arrowhead Community has a unique climate for Southern California with four distinct seasons which support an array of outdoor recreational activity and year-round beauty.

Beginning in late 2011, a catastrophic drought began affecting Lake Arrowhead along with the rest of California.

[24] Lake Arrowhead has appeared in a variety of movies, including The Squaw Man (1914), The High Hand (1926), The Wolf Dog (1933), Fighting Trooper (1934), Heidi (1937), Of Human Hearts (1938), Down in 'Arkansaw' (1938), Spawn of the North (1938), North of the Yukon (1939), Comin' Round The Mountain (1940), Untamed (1940), The Royal Mounted Patrol (1941), Wild Geese Calling (1941), North of the Rockies (1942), Can't Help Singing (1943), The Yearling (1946), Sand (1949), The Parent Trap (1961), Seven Days in May (1964), The Great Race (1965), Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!

[26] In addition, the Lake Arrowhead Conference Center (or a set made to look like it) was the setting for the TV series Dragnet, Season 3, Episode 13 of the 1960s re-boot, where Friday and Gannon attend a conference for Los Angeles Police Department officers to discuss problems and solutions.

Lake Arrowhead is mentioned in passing in Raymond Chandler's 1939 detective novel The Big Sleep.

[27] Located approximately 80 miles (130 km) from downtown Los Angeles, many Hollywood stars and wealthy Angelinos built homes in the area starting in the 1920s and 30s.

In the early years of development, the architectural committee of the resort community mandated that homes be built in the French Norman or English Tudor Style.

Rudolf Schindler, a modernist architect, designed what is known as the first modern A-frame house in 1936 for Gisela Bennati, as his interpretation of French Norman style architecture.

The following is a list of people who have owned or built homes in Lake Arrowhead: John O'Melveny, J.B. Van Nuys[33] (one of the developers of Lake Arrowhead and son of Isaac Newton Van Nuys, founder of Van Nuys, CA), Rhoda Rindge & Merritt Adamson[34] (founders of Malibu, CA), John Northrop, Katherine Iten[35] (Iten Biscuit Company/NABISCO),[36] Edward L. Doheny, Jules Stein, Conrad "Nicky" Hilton, Jr., Dan Dureya, Max Factor, Thomas F. Hamilton, Prince Massianoff, Leo McCarey, Charlie Chaplin, Myrna Loy, Ruth Hussey, Shirley Temple, Lon Chaney, Doris Day, June Lockhart, Walter Huston, Robert Taylor, Loretta Young, Liberace, Brian Wilson, Priscilla Presley and Frankie Avalon to name a few.