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Old Man
Thu Jun 05, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Sometime during the night of May 2nd, the weather finally collapsed a series of ledges on New
Hampshire's Cannon Mountain. But these were more than just rocks; they had formed a human
profile long revered as the state's symbol: The Old Man of The Mountain. Trish Anderton brings
us the story.
The Old Man of the Mountain was a miraculous jumble of granite that hung from a high cliff.
With a ponderous brow and a pointy jaw, the huge stone face looked out over the mountains for
at least 200 years, and possibly a lot longer. But time and weather are hard on rock. As
University of New Hampshire geologist Wallace Bothner explains, they wear away the top layer
of stone. As the stone below gets closer to the surface, it's under less pressure from above,
so it tends to expand.
WB: You can take a cake and put a nice hard chocolate frosting on it and let it harden. Then
bend the cake just a little and you'll get a nice series of cracks in the frosting.
Weather accelerates the process. Heavy rain, snow and below-freezing temperatures can occur
anytime in these mountains. Moisture gets into the rock and then freezes. Professor
Bothner:
WB: There'll be water seeping into the cracks and alternately freezing and thawing and
freezing and thawing and each time it freezes the cracks are enlarged just a little bit more.
Each year, the Old Man's caretakers have rappelled down the profile and patched the cracks
with epoxy, and shored up his brow with cables. But a little bit of glue and wire is no match
for centuries of erosion.
Trish Anderton is a reporter from New Hampshire Public Radio. Funding for The Weather
Notebook comes from Subaru of America and The National Science Foundation. Thanks today to
the entire Weather Notebook staff, Doug Sanborn, Melody Nester, Sean Doucette, and Peter
Crane.
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