The Storytelling Place Red Oak

What stands today is not the original tree. Sometime after a Texas Historic Tree Coalition survey in 2002, this Texas red oak had already lost its main trunks to drought and ice, and what remains is regrowth sprouting from the stump, now barely 25 feet tall. The stump underneath is older: a trail chronicler who has walked this stretch of the Great Trinity Forest for years puts the base at hundreds of years old, probably one of the oldest living things in Dallas. It grows on bare white limestone about a hundred feet from the Storytelling Place, a natural amphitheater where the Comanche told stories long before Dallas existed. A nonprofit called the White Rock Heritage District has been working with the Comanche Nation toward federal recognition of the site, which is a sign the ground is still tended rather than simply left to grow over. Three other marked Comanche trees nearby have not had the same luck. One in Gateway Park, one on an escarpment ridge, one at a trail crossing: all three recorded dead within the last fifteen years, taken by heat, storms or age. This one is the one still standing, or what standing looks like when a tree survives as sprouts rather than as a trunk. Nobody has confirmed its condition with a recent photograph. If you have walked to the Storytelling Place lately, tell us what you saw.