The Old Man is Gone, Get Over it.

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 19^th 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.