The Old Man of the Mountain before its collapse in 2003. Cannon Mountain, Franconia Notch, New Hampshire

            The Old Man of the Mountain, also known as the Great Stone Face or the Profile, was a series of five granite cliff ledges on Cannon Mountain in Franconia, New Hampshire, that appeared to be the jagged profile of a face when viewed from the north. The rock formation was 1,200 feet (370 m) above Profile Lake, and measured 40 feet (12 m) tall and 25 feet (7.6 m) wide.  The writer Nathaniel Hawthorne used the Old Man as inspiration for his short story "The Great Stone Face", published in 1850, in which he described the formation as "a work of Nature in her mood of majestic playfulness".  The profile has been New Hampshire's state emblem since 1945. It was put on the state's license plate, state route signs, and on the back of New Hampshire's Statehood Quarter.  

Freezing and thawing opened fissures in the Old Man's forehead. By the 1920s, the crack was wide enough to be mended with chains. In 1957, the Old Man underwent a more elaborate weatherproofing using 20 tons of fast-drying cement, plastic covering, and steel rods and turnbuckles, plus a concrete gutter to divert runoff from above. A team from the state highway and park divisions maintained the patchwork each summer.  Nevertheless, the Old Man collapsed to the ground on May 3, 2003.  Dismay over the collapse was so great that people left flowers at the base of the cliffs in tribute.

On the first anniversary of the collapse in May 2004, the Old Man of the Mountain Legacy Fund (OMMLF) began operating coin-operated viewfinders near the base of the cliff. When looking through them up at the cliff of Cannon Mountain one could see a "before" and "after" of how the Old Man of the Mountain used to appear.  Seven years after the collapse, on June 24, 2010, the OMMLF, now the Friends of the Old Man of the Mountain, broke ground for the first phase of the state-sanctioned "Old Man of the Mountain Memorial" on a walkway along Profile Lake below Cannon Cliff. It consists of a viewing platform with "Steel Profilers", which, when aligned with the Cannon Cliff above, create what the profile looked like up on the cliff overlooking the Franconia Notch. [Source: Wikipedia]

Taken on: October 5, 2017

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Sets appears in: • Roadside Attractions • Franconia Notch State Park

Camera: Sony DSC-RX100M3, f/4.0, 1/500 sec, 13.5mm, ISO 125 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Sony DSC-RX100M3
Aperture:	f/4.0
Exposure Time:	0.002 sec (1/500)
Focal Length:	13.5mm
ISO:	125
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Program AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Microsoft Windows Photo Gallery 6.0.6001.18000
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