The Old Man of the Mountain, also called the Great Stone Face and the Profile,[1][2] was a series of five granite cliff ledges on Cannon Mountain in Franconia, New Hampshire, United States, that appeared to be the jagged profile of a human face when viewed from the north.

The Old Man formation was likely formed from freezing and thawing of water in cracks of the granite bedrock sometime after the retreat of glaciers 12,000 years ago.

[5] The official state history says several groups of surveyors were working in the Franconia Notch area at the time and claimed credit for the discovery.

After the winter, Gezosa went back up the mountain to bring the news of Tarlo and retrieve Nis Kizos.

A modern addition to the Abenaki legend is that when Stone Face fell in 2003, he finally was re-united with Tarlo.

In the tale, Chief Pemigewassat loved a maiden named Minerwa of the Mohawk people, which brought peace between their tribes for a long time.

When Minerwa went back home to visit her dying father, Chief Pemigewassat promised he would stay and wait for her to return.

However, the Great Spirit claimed him during the winter, and his people buried him facing towards Minerwa to watch for her return.

The writer Nathaniel Hawthorne used the Old Man as inspiration for his 1850 short story "The Great Stone Face", in which he described the formation as "a work of Nature in her mood of majestic playfulness".

By the 1920s, the crack was wide enough to be mended with chains, and in 1957 the state legislature passed a $25,000 appropriation for 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.

[12] 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.