The hook
A seven-story boulder sitting alone in the open Mojave was the site of UFO conventions that drew thousands, and the reason the Integratron down the road exists.
01Why it's worth it
Giant Rock is often called the largest freestanding boulder in the world, seven stories high and covering the footprint of a house, marooned by itself on a flat plain of desert near Landers. It was sacred to Native people for thousands of years, and its modern story is strange even by high-desert standards: in the 1930s a prospector dug himself a home in the ground beneath it, and later George Van Tassel, who ran an airstrip here, said he was contacted by beings from Venus and began hosting the Giant Rock Spacecraft Conventions, UFO gatherings that pulled in thousands through the 1950s and funded his other project, the Integratron a few miles away. A big slab split off the rock in 2000. It's covered in graffiti now and it's just a rock in the desert, but standing under something that huge and that far from anything, knowing what happened here, is its own thing.
02How to experience it
It's out past Landers in the Mojave, about eight hours from the Bay, at the end of dirt roads where high clearance helps. There's nothing there but the rock and the desert, so bring water and don't rely on cell service. It pairs naturally with the Integratron and the rest of the Landers and Joshua Tree oddities.