I hiked to California's mythical Giant Rock, the purported largest freestanding boulder in the world

The purported largest freestanding boulder in the world, Giant Rock stands seven stories tall, weighs an astonishing 30,000 tons and covers an astounding 5,800 square feet on the ground. It’s probably not actually the largest — there are some other contenders in Western Mongolia and South Africa — but it’s certainly in contention globally.

Finding it shouldn’t be hard, except the final three miles of the journey to Giant Rock are through a veritable dust cloud on unpaved sand trails that spider out across the desert in a million different directions — it’s hard to tell where we are on a map, let alone on a phone with a spotty Internet connection.

We choose the correct spider leg ultimately, curving our way around a bend of a modest ridge 16 miles north of Joshua Tree in Landers, Calif. and finally spot it off in the distance. It looks like a big enough rock from afar, but as we rumble closer and closer it just never stops growing, until I'm close enough that it even covers parts of my peripheral vision.

We park a few hundred feet from it and pile out of the car into a silent desert landscape. All you can hear is the sound of a Mojave breeze whipping across your eardrums.

“I can feel the alien vibes in the air,” my 9-year-old daughter says.

:::

It’s hard to say exactly when Giant Rock’s story starts.

There are endless theories about how it ended up in the middle of the desert. There’s an oft-repeated claim that it’s an “erratic” (a rock that doesn’t belong in its surroundings) that ended up here after the last Ice Age (this is false — there’s no trace of glaciation in the desert). Others have postulated it’s an erosional remnant (basically the tip of a big hill that’s been weathered and surrounded by sediment — this is also a nope because of how fractureless Giant Rock is). And then there are the shocking number of books on the subject that believe it was left by extraterrestrials (“Giant Rock: The Greatest UFO Story Never Told” is my personal favorite, but this is sadly wrong, too).

No, this giant ball of Cretaceous-age, garnet-bearing granite almost definitely simply rolled off of the little outcropping next to it. So says Richard Hazlett, Emeritus Professor of Environmental Analysis and Geology at Pomona College. And if there’s anyone to believe, it’s him.

Hazlett has studied the geology of the Joshua Tree area for years and co-authored a book that’s literally titled “Joshua Tree National Park Geology.” Following a 7.3-magnitude earthquake in Landers in 1992, Hazlett was in the high desert studying the effects on the landscape and made quite the discovery.

“Right after the quake we drove out into the valleys north of Landers trying to find some of the fractures in the desert floor, and the earthquake shook free a lot of the fractured, weathered rock high up on the mountaintop that rolled and tumbled down onto the desert,” he says. “They were practically house-sized — well, cabin-sized — and they came down with such speed that they not only rolled across the sand, they bounced a fair distance from the range — several 100 feet in some cases.

“I had no trouble visualizing Giant Rock as a fragment of the range, and the only thing that would dislodge it was a really big earthquake from the past. Any trace of the impact it made when it hit the foot of the range has since been covered up by sediment. But I can come up with no other theory, and it makes sense to me based on what I’ve seen elsewhere in the desert.”

Unfortunately, Hazlett wasn’t around to share this conclusion in the middle of the last century.

:::

The first real national attention for Giant Rock came in the ‘30s when prospector Frank Critzer used dynamite to blow a hole under the rock and then built a small subterranean apartment underneath it. A 1940 issue of Popular Science claims his apartment was a roomy 24ft by 36ft, and stayed between 55 and 80 degrees year-round. Critzer also built a makeshift airport runway in the dry lakebed next to Giant Rock by dragging timber and iron behind his car, and put radio antennas atop the gargantuan boulder — which, along with his last name and war-time hysteria, drew speculation he may be a German spy.

But Critzer was born in 1886 in Waynesboro, Virginia, as confirmed by both census reports and his WWI draft registration card, despite countless Internet reports that identify him as a German national. And according to an Associated Press story in 1984 that included an interview with George Knepp — a Landers resident who knew Critzer — he wasn’t a spy, but instead “an ordinary, lonely guy.”

Nonetheless, the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept tabs on him via local law enforcement. Harold Simpson, a Riverside County deputy, told the AP he made regular visits to Critzer and filed reports to the FBI after each trip to Giant Rock. On Simpson’s final visit on July 24, 1942, Critzer died in an alleged self-detonated dynamite explosion just outside of his apartment door after the deputies tried to bring him in for questioning. None of the officers were killed despite the blast, which turned out to be a stroke of luck after 217 pounds of undetonated dynamite were found inside his subterranean home.

Shockingly, though, Critzer — a man who built a living quarters under a 30,000-ton rock, and an airport in the middle of the Mojave Desert — wasn’t even Giant Rock’s most famous resident. That honor would go to his friend George Van Tassel.

:::

By 1947, Van Tassel — an Ohio man who moved to California in 1930 — his wife Eva and their three daughters moved to Giant Rock.

He leased the land for Giant Rock Airport from the Bureau of Land Management with the support of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, according to court records, and reopened Critzer’s airfield. He built a small commercial airport facility, selling fuel to airplanes landing there, plus his wife ran a cafe dubbed the Come on Inn, which served burgers and spiced apple pies a few dozen feet from the rock.

To who exactly?

Well, you see, Van Tassel picked himself up quite the following in the 1950s, because according to Van Tassel, he regularly communicated with aliens. He wrote a book in 1956 about his first encounter with them, where he was awakened by a tall tan alien and taken aboard their ship, and for about 20 years hosted Flying Saucer Conventions at Giant Rock that were attended by as many as 15,000 people.

In a 1957 issue of LIFE Magazine, Van Tassel said aliens persuaded him to run for President in 1960 and offered to help run his campaign. That, disappointedly, never materialized.

He’d go on to build the Integratron — a 16-sided dome that was technically supposed to be used to collect “up to 50,000 volts of static electricity from the air in order to charge the human body” — three miles south of Giant Rock on the advice of his alien friends. But he never finished it, and when he died in 1978, no one could find any sort of plans to help him complete it. Too bad.

Today, it’s mostly just a place people go to take Instagram photos, with an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 visitors each year.

:::

“You’ve arrived,” the muffled Waze voice says in my pocket. It’s around 2 p.m. when we start to snake through the sand to Giant Rock for the first time.

Along the way I spot the foundation of Eva Van Tassel’s Come on Inn. And even though it’s been filled with sand, there are still some remnants of Critzer’s subterranean home on the dark side of the boulder. It’s 20 degrees colder in the shadow of Giant Rock, and it all sort of starts to make sense how Critzer (and then Van Tassel) survived the 100-degree summer heat.

I also see the sizable piece of the rock that broke off in 2000 after millions of years of expanding and contracting in the desert heat.

There’s only one other person in the area when we first arrive, a shirtless, leather-skinned, excessively hairy old man who’s camping out of his car with an elaborate tarp setup a few hundred feet from Giant Rock. If there was one Van Tassel follower left, my money would be on it being him.

I circle the granite behemoth a couple of times and find rock climbing carabiners anchored into it at places, a chilling alien face and “RIP earthlings” painted alongside all kinds of nonsense graffiti, which is not just part of Giant Rock, but of the ridge alongside it.

The surrounding range has become a sort of crowd-sourced art exhibit, filled with everything from RIP tags and immature political statements (there are a lot of dicks) to a Star Wars resistance logo and someone’s Twitter handle. My personal favorite is an oddly shaped square rock with a little nub coming out of one end that someone painted car windows and a taillight on. I decide this is Minivan Rock.

I hike through the boulder-y range while my daughters trek up to two giant eyes painted three-quarters of the way up the ridge with their uncle. There’s broken glass everywhere that — based on all of the bullet-hole riddled cans and shotgun shells — was likely used for post-party target practice.

I find a good sitting rock near a colorful 420 tag and a game of spray-painted Tic-Tac-Toe, and sit and stare at Giant Rock for a while, trying to imagine what Professor Hazlett theorized. The temperature swings in and out of the rock’s shadow have my body sort of on edge, not sure if it’s too hot or too cold, and my thoughts feel kind of the same way.

I know the scientific explanation makes total sense, but out here in the middle of nowhere, faced with the largest boulder I’ve ever seen in my life (by a lot), I can’t help but feel pulled by the invisible hand of an extraterrestrial one.