The first time we drove through Nederland, Colorado, like most other visitors, we were on our way to one of many ski resorts.  This quiet mountain town, with its small ski lodge houses, and a frozen lake full of ice skaters and ice-fisherman, was at first glance much like many other no-stoplight towns in Colorado.  When we next came to Nederland four weeks later, everything had changed.  The streets were full of people in an assortment of costumes, including hunters, terrorists, vampires and the dead.  Welcome to Frozen Dead Guy Days.

Every year since 2001 Nederland celebrates Frozen Dead Guy Days, a full weekend of festivities celebrating the town's most famous inhabitant, Bredo Morstoel (a.k.a. Grandpa), a dead Norwegian man kept frozen with dry ice blocks in a Tuff Shed.  The celebrations include a beauty pageant for the title of Ice Queen, a dance entitled Grandpa's Blue Ball, a Polar Plunge into a frozen lake and the much-anticipated Coffin Race (all sponsored by Tuff Shed).  In this race, contestants form teams, such as the Manitou Springs's Fat Elvises, La Muerte, Barbie Cannot Get Pregnant - Ken Comes In Different Box, create appropriate costumes, and build elaborate, plywood coffins.  The race consists of a difficult obstacle course, through which each team of six coffin-bearers carries a seventh member in their coffin.  Perhaps the most challenging obstacle was the initial passage through a Tuff Shed with narrow doors, which usually "scraped off" a number of coffin-bearers, most of whom had already taken advantage of the numerous New Belgium brewery tents.  The tie-dyed coffin of the Grateful Dead tribute team was reduced to a mere plank in this difficult course, and while they managed to complete the race, they lost to the Drs. Fungi (commentator: "The spores have it!").  All in all they had little for which to be grateful.

Grandpa's saga began in 1994 when town authorities were alerted to two frozen bodies in a shed in Nederland.  It turns out that Trygve Bauge, a free-spirited, eccentric Norwegian illegal immigrant, and Nederland resident, had frozen the corpses before his deportation.  While Bauge had planned one day to build a complex cryogenic facility, a passion of his, these two bodies were only stored in a coffin and a sleeping bag.  The younger body belonged to a young cryogenic customer and the elder happened to be Trygve's grandfather, Bredo.  While the local government arranged for an expedient burial for the younger man, Trygve's mother and Bredo's daughter, Aud Morstoel, vehemently opposed his removal and thawing.  Aud and her son Trygve were firm believers in cryogenics, and moreover, the local authorities could not find any law forbidding their actions.  In the end, Grandpa was placed in a new, more spacious shed (provided by Tuff Shed), where he still lies.  Every three weeks, Trygve's friend Bo Shaffer (a.k.a. Ice Man) comes with fresh dry ice to cover Bredo's steel-coffin; chained up, lest someone try to steal him.  Recently, the story of Nederland, Trygve and Bredo has been retold in an award-winning documentary "Grandpa's Still in the Tuff Shed," and the festival itself has been dramatized in a mystery novel by Pamalla Stockho, One Too Many Frozen Dead Guys.

The town of Nederland has responded quite positively to these eerie events that would seem morbid in most other places.  The locals are not bothered by the presence of a frozen dead man overlooking their town, nor do they seem to mind that Grandpa was not even frozen according to more "scientific cryogenic industry" standards and that his body has defrosted several times.  Rather, the frozen Norwegian man has become a sort of local mascot, the subject of ghost stories, and the honoree of a late winter festival, the Frozen Dead Guy Days where grumpy teenagers, fans of the morbid and curious out-of-towners gather to watch locals poke fun at themselves with events like the Polar Plunge.  This year, while firefighters were busy cutting a whole in the ice with chainsaws, a visibly drunken man came running onto the ice fully clothed and jumped into the small ice-pit only to wander off into the woods alone afterwards.  The first legitimate diver, Betty Green, had an elaborate stage to set for her icy dive.  First she placed a cardboard oil drum, upon which she had written "OIL HABIT," in front of the ice pit. Then she rolled towards the water wrapped in a sleeping bag labeled "WAR."  She rolled way off course, but then corrected herself, threw off the sleeping bag to reveal her green leotard, kicked the "OIL HABIT" drum over to expose solar panels, and took out a model of a windmill.  As she cart-wheeled straight into the water, the announcer cried: "Keep Betty Green with solar and wind power!"

Indeed while most of the festival attendees are there to have fun, the Cyrogenics Advocacy Group (a.k.a. Go Cryo!) sends two representatives to present the serious, potentially "life-saving benefits" of cryonics.  Although we had spent an entire day celebrating the morbid and absurd figure of frozen Grandpa in an eccentric mountain town, it was only after encountering people who seriously and passionately believe in the "science" behind cryogenics that we began to feel creeped out.  Despite the enthusiasm of the advocates (one had a t-shirt reading "Cryonics is really cool!"), the attendees, many of whom had recently seen the movie "Idiocracy," carefully kept their distance from the booth, and headed instead to the New Belgium brewery tent.

It began to snow in the afternoon and Nederland was soon covered in white.  The antique store on the corner ("Off Her Rocker") advertised organic pillows and blankets and a tall, mohawked black poodle peered inside suspiciously.  Nederland is only 15 miles west of Boulder, but at 3,000 feet higher in elevation, the air is much thinner.