The Old Man of the Mountain

For more than a century, the forty-foot stack of granite ledges on the face of Cannon Mountain appeared in profile as a human face: brow, nose, jutting chin, all assembled by geological accident from five separate rock outcroppings that happened, from the right angle, at the right distance, to look unmistakably like a man. Daniel Webster, who saw it, reportedly said that God had hung out a sign in New Hampshire to show that in New England He makes men. The face was on the state quarter. It was on every road sign entering New Hampshire. It was on the state's promotional materials for generations.

On the night of May third, two thousand three, during a wet spring that had been expanding and contracting the rock with freezing and thawing cycles for weeks, the ledges shifted and fell. There was no dramatic collapse. No one was there to see it. By morning the face was gone.

The state had been bolting and cementing the formation together since nineteen sixteen, inserting metal rods into the cracks, applying epoxy to fractures, monitoring the profile through every winter. The supports had held for eighty-seven years. Then they did not.

What surprised observers in the years after the collapse was how much it affected people who had never thought of themselves as particularly sentimental about geology. The state continued using the Old Man's image on tourism materials for years after there was no longer an Old Man. The mountain is still there. Franconia Notch is still there. The parking area from which the profile used to be visible is still there, with an interpretive sign explaining what you cannot see.