No other tree that I know dwarfs so regularly and completely as this under changes of climate due to changes in elevation.
At the foot of a canon 4000 feet above the sea you may find magnificent specimens of this oak fifty feet high, with craggy, bulging trunks, five to seven feet in diameter, and at the head of the canon, 2500 feet higher, a dense, soft, low, shrubby growth of the same species, while all the way up the canon between these extremes of size and habit a perfect gradation may be traced.

The largest I have seen was fifty feet high, eight feet in diameter, and about seventy-five feet in spread.

The trunk was all knots and buttresses, gray like granite, and about as angular and irregular as the boulders on which it was growing--a type of steadfast, unwedgeable strength..