In general, analysis of mountains is performed at singular scales of measurement. However, analysis of a location at multiple scales allows for a greater amount of information to be extracted from a DEM about the spatial characteristics of a feature. In this study, the variation in the spatial extent over which mountains are defined is used as the basis to characterize the size distribution of mountains. First, the lifting scheme is used to generate multiscale DEMs. Mountains extraction is then performed on the generated multiscale DEMs. The size distribution of the extracted mountains is characterized by implementing opening by reconstruction iteratively on the extracted mountains using square kernels of increasing size. A power law relationship is observed between the number and total area of mountain objects remaining. This power law arises as a consequence of the fractal properties of the size distribution of mountains extracted from multiscale DEMs. © 2007 Asian Network for Scientific Information.