having grown up in the northeast, lived just a hop skip and a jump from the old man while at dartmouth and hiked a good deal in the white mountains, i was sad to see that the ancient rock formation collapsed recently. it’s hard to imagine that nathian hawthorne once waxed poetic about the curious collection of rocks:

“Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: ”It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice.” We are titans of another sort these days. Hawthorne wrote that if a viewer of the Great Stone Face walked up too close to it, ”he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another.””