The You Yangs sits about halfway between the Brisbane Ranges to the west and the nearest coast, at Corio Bay to the south-east.

Although its highest point, Flinders Peak at the southern end, is only 319 m, the You Yangs dominate the surrounding landscape and are clearly identifiable from nearby Geelong, Melbourne and beyond.

The You Yangs are the site of a geoglyph of Bunjil, a Dreamtime creator deity to some of the Indigenous people of Victoria, depicted as an wedge-tailed eagle.

The geoglyph was constructed by the Australian artist Andrew Rogers in recognition of the local Indigenous Wathaurong people.

[3] The Yawangi people enlarged natural hollows in the rocks to form wells that held water even in dry seasons.

The You Yangs were chosen to depict some battle scenes for the HBO World War II series The Pacific.

They are an inselberg or monadnock,[10] and the granite that forms them was originally a mass of magma that had worked its way up into the surrounding sedimentary rocks during the Devonian period, when the land surface in Victoria was several kilometres higher than today.

Many introduced plants occur in the You Yangs, some planted deliberately for forestry, including sugar gum (E. cladocalyx), swamp yate (E. occidentalis) and brown mallet (E. astringens), and others that have been introduced accidentally or have invaded the area, for example, boneseed (Chyrsanthemoides monilifera) and bridal creeper (Asparagus asparagoides).

The You Yangs are home to more than 200 bird species such as tawny frogmouths, white-naped, white-plumed, New Holland and brown-headed honeyeaters, kookaburras, white-winged choughs, crested shriketits, eastern rosellas, crimson rosellas, purple-crowned lorikeets, sulphur-crested cockatoos, eastern yellow robins, jacky winters and scarlet robins.

[15] Mammals living in the park include eastern grey kangaroos, echidnas, swamp wallabies, sugar gliders, brushtail and ringtail possums, and koalas.

The population has been recorded to prefer to roost in river red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis): 34% of sightings occur in that species.