Dec. 22, 2003

The Mysterious End of the Old Man of the Mountain Explained

Story reproduced with permission from the New Hampshire Sunday News

The Old Man of the Mountain is a photogenic, New Hampshire emblem: a beloved, colossal profile of natural granite high atop a sheer cliff in the White Mountains¹ Franconia Notch. Geologists believe that the stony visage was formed by a retreating glacier during the last ice age, and had looked out over Profile Lake for more than 12,000 years. Recently, Brian Fowler, owner and president of North American Reserve, a mining engineering company in Laconia, New Hampshire, who had studied the Old Man of the Mountain for the state when it was preparing to build Franconia Notch Parkway in 1976 told the story of the icon¹s inevitable end.

The visage was universally recognized: an old man staring stoically from his perch atop Franconia Notch. Skiers on their way to or from Cannon Mountain in the Notch often stopped beside the road and looked south and up on the mountain ridge to see the stern familiar face. Fowler says that Old Man actually was made of five slabs of Conway granite balanced atop one another. Hidden in the familiar view from the north was a cavern, about four feet wide, behind the Old Man's chin that ran almost the entire width of the Old Man's face.

About 80 percent of the chin block hung out over the cliff, according to Fowler. Thus, just about two feet of the chin was anchored to the cliff, held there only by the weight of the four slabs above it. Amazingly, the other four slabs were positioned just so, so that the center of gravity of the chin block was within that two-foot span, allowing the entire Old Man to balance on its chin for centuries.

Through the years, rain and snow, blown through Franconia Notch on southerly winds, was driven into the cavern and the other cracks between and within the five slabs. One property of water is that it expands when it freezes, and water freezing in a crack in a rock will act as a wedge when it expands, making such cracks larger, eventually splitting the rock.

Rocks are comprised of minerals, many of which react chemically with water. Those reactions can weaken the rock from within, eventually breaking it down. Conway granite is loaded with the mineral potash feldspar, which is particularly reactive with water. According to Fowler, the physical and chemical damage to the Old Man's granite through the years, especially in the cavern, eventually wore away enough rock just behind the chin that the center of gravity of that block moved slightly forward toward the edge of the cliff face.

On May 3, 2003, the delicate balance that had held the Great Stone Face‹as it was called in a short story by the early American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne‹in position came to an abrupt end. Fowler believes the chin tumbled down the cliff, and the rest quickly followed. The Old Man was no more.