May, 2013 is the tenth anniversary of the disappearance of the so-called "Old Man" in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. To this day, the image of this beloved icon remains like a ghost on New Hampshire license plants, highway signs and in some instances, official state stationary. Below is a piece originally written for the May 2007 issue of New Hampshire Magazine. Little has changed, except the monument noted in the article has been created in a scaled back form.
One morning in May, 2003, the people of New Hampshire awoke
to the news that an ancient natural rock formation high on a mountain in
Franconia Notch, which when viewed at a certain angle bore a craggy, amazingly
stark outline of a man’s profile, had slid off into oblivion sometime during the
night after enduring centuries of fierce weather.
The news of the sudden disappearance of the Old Man of the
Mountains, as this natural wonder had come to be known, shocked people. It had
jutted out from a cliff some 1200 feet above the aptly named Profile Lake for
who knows how long, maybe 10,000 years? Since the last Ice Age some geologists
said.
There are very beautiful pictures nearly everywhere of the
Old Man, for sale at gift shops or convenience stores around the state, or
available on the internet. Yet none of these images do justice to what this
configuration of rock appeared like in “person,” as it were. But everything is
different in the mountains, anyway. Ask any skier, hiker or rock climber. The
peaks, the sky, the air, the shadows against uncountable trees and boulders
bring a hugeness of scale upon ones senses that invigorates, clears the head,
sharpens the eye. So when you drove along amid all this, turned a corner in the
road and looked up, suddenly you saw this giant brow and nose and chin emerge
against the sky, and of course, no matter how many times you passed this way,
you just had to pull over, stop the car, get out and stand there and take in
That Face. That Great Stone Face as Hawthorne called it.
After early 19th Century settlers happened upon
him while mapping the wilderness, artists and poets were soon making the trek
north on crude roads to paint and write about this visage. Before that, they say
Indians venerated him. Certainly our forebears did. He was a sign that in New
Hampshire “God makes men,” Daniel Webster supposedly wrote. In modern times the
Old Man’s image was placed on the state’s license plates, highway signs, and
official and unofficial government logos and stationary, to say nothing of
hundreds of kinds of souvenirs and promotional material. Years after he
disappeared into a thousand pieces at the foot of a cliff, his image remains
everywhere. We just don’t have the heart to let him go.
Now, near an existing museum honoring his memory, we hear
of plans to create a Stonehenge-type “monument” to the Old Man of several acres,
consisting of pathways and giant monoliths of granite to be situated near Cannon
Mountain and Profile Lake. The idea is that as one observes these slabs from a
platform, an image of a profile will appear as one’s eye scans across them, just
so.
Of course this is all preposterous. Well intentioned but
preposterous. Not only will this not do justice to what the Old Man was, but
these odd, unsightly configurations will disrupt a beautiful natural area, and
create something that will lose meaning as years pass. Future generations will
be as stumped about these strange shapes as we are about those weird face
statues on Easter Island. They’ll probably think aliens placed them there. What
we really need to be working on is something new for our road signage and
license plates.
The Old Man of the Mountains is gone. It’s time to get over
it and move on.
This article first appeared as a "Capital Offenses"
Column in the May, 2007 edition of New Hampshire Magazine. See this link at NHCommentary.Com: http://www.nhcommentary.com/OldManoftheMountain.html
The Old Man of the Mountain
Site Today
Posted August 21, 2020 - In the course of time, the Stonehenge or
Easter Island type memorial mentioned above became deemed impractical and was
never built. Instead, using an array of seven steel beams placed at the base of
Cannon Mountain beside Profile Lake, along a neatly constructed plaza with
stones engraved with the names of hundreds of donors, a quite unique system of
small templates have been posted atop each, aligned just so. This allows one
upon approach to move one's head and cock one's eye in a way to actually view,
out of the ether, across the now bare face of the mountain where the Great
Profile once protruded, an amazing likeness of the "Great Stone Face" himself.
It's all very well done, and in this observer's opinion, accurately represents
as much as can be expected, what he and millions of others once saw across the
notch with the naked eye. With a little care, one is even able to catch a pretty
good snapshot of the image through the viewer.*
Note: The Old Man of the Mountain Profile
Plaza, with these seven "profilers" as they're called, was dedicated in June
201l, and is located at Exit 34B from I-93. There is a museum and gift shop near
the plaza, and an exhibit in the nearby Cannon Mountain Tramway Building. For
more information, visit this site:
Old Man
of the Mountain Legacy Fund
*Camera shot through the
profiler template. Profile Plaza photos by Dean Dexter
with William Graham
Bowdoin Hill, July 4, 2015.
