> > > Of course, I was also thinking "WHAT Old Woman of the Mountain?"
> > >
> > > :-)
> >
> > That part was absolutely true.
>
> Yes. I seem to recall mention of another Face being elsewhere on Profile Mountain. The State Park highway authority has done a beautiful job putting in various viewing vantage points and lookout stops, such that the natural flow of traffic along the I-93 hardly seems affected.
>
> I'm still wondering which other parts of Sam's ostensible "camping trip" are true. Did anyone actually do any camping? :-) While Dave and Darien were busy trading jibes about alleged papasan chairs -- well, what are these papasan anyway, I'd still like to know -- I was off canoeing blissfully on Slavery Lake, without a care in the world. Later on that day, we spent the afternoon relaxing with my mother-in-law's cottage garden, encouraging baby toads and wood frogs to reside in her flower beds because they control the insects, and discussing whether we should invert some old flower pots and cut holes into them to create "Toad Houses" to keep the amphibians happy. All this time, I was happily unaware that Dave had decided to take over the world with a fake *non-camping* post from Sam...
>
>
> > Like I said, it's half way down the mountain, half the size, and half as detailed, and it's not visible at quite the same angle
>
> Half the size, half the calories maybe, but still twice the caffeine right? :-)
>
>
> > as where everybody stops to look at the Old Man, so nobody really notices. And it's admittedly a bit of a stretch, but there is, in fact, the profile of what looks like a curmudgeonly old woman visible a bit down the road to the left of where the old man can be seen.
>
> Ah. I hear that the Great Stone Face (the main one of course) is the most famous of NH's natural scenic wonders. It certainly is impressive, and as a tourist attractive it's very well managed. Just how "natural" is it, however, when there's two gigantic turnbuckles screwed into the forehead slab to hold it up, and the rest of the face is held together with fiberglass sheets and epoxy glue? Were it left up to the natural forces of erosion, that 25 ton forehead slab would have fallen down two decades ago, scraping the face's nose off in the process, and maybe even squashing any Quebec tourists stupid enough to stand underneath it (Score!). And with the Old Man fallen down, Sam wouldn't have to worry about any more idiotic Quebec drivers gawping at the former scenic wonder and running head-on into oncoming tractor-trailers. That's right! It would be a win-win situation all around, if only we were wise enough and humble enough to let Profile Mountain return to its natural destiny in the great wilderness.
>
> Wolf "and the parts about canoeing and Toad Houses were true ^_^" spirit

Everybody is talking about the Old Man, aka The Great Stone Face, and what could have, would have, should have happened to it, but nobody mentions the really great, true story of how it got there.
Like most of the topographical features of New England, The Old Man is the result of glaciation during the last ice age. Make that the last, so far. The continental ice sheet came down across New England moving generally southeast. It scraped off the high places and filled in the low places and gave the area the rock outcrops, the drumlins, kettles, moraines and all those other features that we call Walden's Pond, Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, The Old Man, etc. Mostly, these features are made up of granite that was left exposed after the ice removed overlying layers. Or granite and other rocks ground into sand, clay and gravel. Often this stuff is mixed together and includes all those rounded rocks and bolders that New Englanders use for building, and lining flower beds. Even Plymouth Rock is a gift of the ice age, even though it's more recent history is sometimes questionable.
What was New England like before the ice? Well the hills and mountains were taller, the coast lines were generally further west and/or north and there were more extrusive igneous rocks on the surface. Personally, I was surprised to find volcanic rocks still showing in the Lexington, Bedford, Concord triangle. You have to look carefully between the granite and other intrusive igneous to find volcanics, but it's there. If those granite bolders had license plates, you might be surprised to find that many of them came from Canada via the ice express more than 9000 years ago. Next time you are on Cape Cod, pick up some of that course sand on the beaches and look at it carefully. It's a mixture of everything from everywhere. On a hardness scale from 1 to 10, it's mostly seven and up. Otherwise, it would have been ground into fine clay. New England has more interesting things than dead poets, and 300-year-old houses. I think I've just talked myself into a jaunt to New England.
Question: How much of this is true?
Howard