5/4/2003: Old Man of the Mountain gone

[Undertoad]

The news yesterday was incredibly sad to some of us: New Hampshire's "Old Man of the Mountain" fell away overnight.

The Old Man was a rock face in the shape of a man's face, in profile. Alone, that sounds about as interesting as the Virgin Mary "discoveries" that IotD sometimes features. But the Old Man was a little more striking, although you couldn't necessarily tell just by the postcard images:



It's more striking than that because the face was at the top of a cliffside, in a location where people would travel through the mountains as they headed north. If you saw the face from that perspective, it would be a little more interesting. Here's a pic I took when I was last there in fall 2000, that puts a little more perspective on it. And I cropped away another half of hillside, and keep in mind that the Old Man's face is about 40 feet high:



No wonder that early visitors, pre-GameBoy and even pre-television, were amazed to find the face. Daniel Webster once said about it, "Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men."

The Old Man has a different personal significance to me. My grandparents moved to Franconia, New Hampshire and lived the second half of their lives there, a town of less than a thousand people a few miles from the rock formation.

I feel a deep connection to northern New Hampshire, and northern New Hampshire felt a connection to the Old Man. My mom (Katkeeper) said to me that she was actually glad that the Old Man didn't fall in her father's lifetime.

I thought that was a very striking thing to say. And yet, although I saw the Old Man of the Mountain a few times, it was not all that memorable to me. New Hampshire's mountains are the memorable vision. You look all around and are struck by them. The beauty is everywhere. That's what the tourists should come to see, even if there is no bumper sticker for it.

On the other hand, let them stay at home, and let Franconia stay a town of less than a thousand people.