The two most remarkable features of the Landers landscape are a boulder and a building. Giant Rock covers approximately 5,800 square feet of desert floor — about the size of a large house — and stands roughly seven stories tall, making it possibly the largest free-standing boulder in the world. It is sacred to indigenous people of the area, who have relationships with the rock that predate the community of Landers by thousands of years. Near the rock, a man named George Van Tassel began construction in 1957 of the Integratron, a wood-and-metal dome he claimed was a time machine and rejuvenation chamber built according to instructions received from extraterrestrial visitors. Van Tassel worked on it until his death in 1978; it was never completed for its stated purpose. It now operates as a venue for sound baths.

The high desert elevation and distance from major urban light pollution have made Landers a destination for amateur astronomers. The community hosts two significant astronomical facilities: GMARS, the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio-Optical Observatory, which encompasses more than 23 individual observatories and carries the Minor Planet Center observatory code G79; and CS3, which operates nine robotic observatories that conduct automated sky surveys. The concentration of observatories in and around a community of fewer than 3,000 people is remarkable — a function of the same sky conditions that attracted Van Tassel's more idiosyncratic investigations. Landers is not just a place to look at rocks; it is a place where serious astronomical work happens alongside the UFO tourism.

About 2,982 people live in Landers according to recent census counts, spread across the desert terrain in a pattern typical of unincorporated Mojave communities: large lots, few amenities, considerable distance between neighbors. The community has attracted people who want space and solitude without the organizational constraints of a planned development. The nickname Landroids suggests a community that has embraced its own oddness, and the mix of amateur astronomers, desert homesteaders, artists, and the simply eccentric that the Mojave attracts creates a social texture that larger, more organized communities rarely produce. Highway 247 connects Landers to Twentynine Palms to the east and Yucca Valley to the south.

The combination of Giant Rock, the Integratron, the observatories, and the Landers Earthquake of 1992 — which measured 7.3 magnitude and caused widespread damage throughout the high desert — gives this small community a remarkably dense history of notable events relative to its size. The earthquake collapsed part of Giant Rock, which had been solid for its entire recorded history. Van Tassel's legacy attracts both true believers and curious skeptics. The amateur astronomers contribute to actual scientific literature. The Landroids continue to describe their landscape with a certain cheerful hyperbole that the actual beauty of the high desert skies partly justifies. Landers is the kind of place that rewards the drive out, which in the Mojave Desert is always longer than it looks on the map.