[Music] [Music and people cheering] [Music] [Music] Were good!

We are doing great.

Having a great time.

Oh we're having a blast.

It's an amazing event.

[Music] This is my second year attending Frozen Dead Guy Days.

Oh this is our first year.

This is my first time ever coming to Frozen Dead Guys.

2018, I think, was my first one.

First time I went Frozen Dead Guy Days was 2007.

[Music] So I've heard about it through friends over the years.

It's always been kind of a rite of passage.

This is probably one of the weirder things that happens in Colorado.

A party for a frozen dead guy.

Good beer, mountain towns, weird people.

It's a festival of weirdos and what's not to love?

It's not like anything we never heard of before so we thought it would be a lot of fun to come see and the Stanley Hotel is pretty cool to have here for this kind of an event, too.

With it's horror background and everything.

I noticed there's a big sense of like community.

I've seen like kids here and like elderly people.

Everybody seems to be having a really good time.

Being here with such a cool event in the mountains is awesome.

I love Estes Park so much.

Just the tiny town feel is amazing.

Estes Park is beautiful.

You already can see all around.

It's amazing.

[Music] [Music] My favorite part so far has been last night we went to the blue ball and seeing everybody dressed up.

I love seeing all the costumes and everyone having a great time.

Number three!

[People cheering] My favorite thing about the festival is the coffin races, because I love the costumes, the spirit ,the intension.

A bit of athletic prowess.

[Music and people cheering] The fashion show was really cool I was not expecting that.

[Music and people cheering] I loved the polar plunge.

[Music and people cheering] The coffin races were pretty good, but the music lineup has been really fantastic.

[Music] My favorite part, I would say, is the community of people.

Everyone is here to have a good time.

Everyone's dressing up.

Everyone participates in the races and the events.

[Music] We love costumes.

We also love that it's different and just knowing the history of why it happened.

I think it's a very weird and creepy and interesting story.

[Music fading out] I was working at the Daily Camera in Boulder as a features writer.

I got a phone call one afternoon from the dispatcher up at the Nederland Marshal's office, and she said, Hey, we got a really weird situation up here.

This sort of crazy Norwegian guy Trygve Bauge, he had been deported several months before.

His mother had stayed behind.

Now she'd been deported.

She was actually the one who got the dispatcher.

So she called and said, What are we going to do about Grandpa?

Like, what?

[Inaudible silly voice talking] They discovered that Trygves grandfather, Auds father, they had years before had him cryogenically frozen, brought to Colorado, and they stuck him in a shed.

And so this person called me up and said, What do we do?

And I was like, Nothing until I get there.

[Car tires screeching] [Music] They called the cops and the coroner and then this and that, and we were there.

It was a crappy old shed.

And there was this kind of like refrigerator thing and he opened it up and we looked down in there and it looked like a stainless steel coffin, like from my awesome science fiction movie, all covered with frost.

I've been a reporter long enough to know, like, this one's going to go big.

Authorities have found two bodies frozen in a shed in Nederland.

They found the body, and that was a huge news story.

I mean, they had worldwide news.

My neighbor called and she said, turn on the TV.

Your hometown is on television.

The bodies were being stored on dry ice by Trygve Bauge.

Many people know him as the head of the local Polar Bear Club.

One was his grandfather.

The other was a man from Chicago.

Grandpa Bredo was a minor public official in Norway, but when he died in 1989, 32 degrees, his eccentric grandson, Trygve, had him cryogenically preserved and moved to Nederland.

He was planning to build a cryonics lab of his own here until he got deported.

[Static noise] I've been up there 50 years and nobody had a clue.

The town went berserk.

The town board, they didn't know about it.

And just bedlam broke loose.

The situation up there, is up there right now is not a legal situation.

Once the county discovered this was happening, they tried to sort of evict.

How do you evict a dead person?

I don't even know.

But they tried to have him move the bodies someplace else.

But Trygve was like, there's no law against having a frozen body.

[Music] They realized there was actually no legal mechanism to eject the body.

There was no law being violated.

So the county passed a law that said it was illegal and then tried to enforce the law.

There was commentary and letters to the editor and people saying, well, what if he melts into the water supply?

These are the the cranks and the ex-hippies and the gun people and the miners.

You'd think it'd be like, yeah, no big deal.

No, no, no, no.

They freaked out.

It became a local topic of activism basically to defend his rights, to stay up there.

So they did.

And so Grandpa Bredo got grandfathered into this law and it was legal to stay up there.

[Music] [Music] I had written stories about Trygve, I had written about his polar bear exploits.

We will cut big hole in the ice with a chainsaw.

I expect it to be about ten inches of ice today.

Usually then we take warm and cold showers to prepare for the ice bathing.

And sometimes you also take coffee enemas to really get high and going.

[Trygve yelling and laughing] I had also written about his legal troubles.

In 1986, Bauge was arrested at Stapleton Airport after allegedly making hijack threats to a United Airlines clerk.

How many Norwegians does it take to hijack an airplane?

Are jokes dangerous?

I didn't think so either.

But apparently the Denver police is of a different opinion.

He had this very libertarian attitude, and he just thought it was illegitimate, that any state could require him to have a visa or whatever.

And then he became a wanted man and he began eluding agents and finding ways to sneak out the back of his house.

Last week, immigration officers finally caught up with Bauge to deport him.

He refused to bathe and had to be carried onto the plane.

He was very solid about what he believed, and he thought that if he preserved grandpa long enough, they'd come up with the technology to resurrect him.

[Ice shattering] Yeah!

[Music] If Aud, his mother had not, you know, called the dispatcher.

Nobody would have ever known anything.

And there would have been nothing.

It just would be nothing.

That's how much of a non threat it was.

Trygve was sending money to this guy from Longmont, Bo, who would just come put dry ice on it.

My name is Bo Schaffer.

They call me the Iceman because I bring a ton roughly 2,000 pounds of dry ice, once a month up to the International Cryonics Institute, where our most famous client, Bredo Morstoel, is being kept in cryogenic preservation in hopes that he'll someday be revived.

Bo Schaffer, the Iceman.

He would give tours.

Well, I unlock the shed here and pulls up the thing and There he is, theres Bredo.

And there was also a bottle of, I think, Wild Turkey that people could salute Grandpa.

I guess he liked Wild Turkey or something.

[Music] My grandfather died in November 1989.

He is Bredo [inaudible] Morstoel is his name.

When I was still in Noraway, beforeI moved to the United States where I lived 14 years without that passport or a visa or anything you know?

I spoke to my grandfather back in the 1970s, you know, ten or more than ten years before he died.

And he said he had a premontion that he would be frozen.

And he said, Trygve you had to take care that you can finance it.

So, yes, he was favorably, you know, to cryonics.

And when he died, I used my inheritance to freeze him down.

I would like to secure that my grandfather gets stored and frozen until we sometime in the future can clone him.

I think the most realistic approach here is to wait for science to catch up so that they are able to clone the Tasmanian tiger or the mammoth from Siberia or so on, and then they can use that technology to then clone my grandfather too.

[Music] Wow!

[Music and birds chirping] I was president of the Chamber of Commerce and we knew we wanted to do a winter festival to help when Eldora closes until, you know, the summer traffic starts, the businesses here suffer.

[Music] And people said, well, let's call it March Madness.

And we all went, ugh, boring.

So I told him about a festival down in Fruita, Colorado called Mike the Headless Chicken Days.

[Chicken sounds] In the 1940s somebody was cutting the head off of their chicken for dinner, but they cut it too high.

So the chicken never died.

It was just running around without a head.

Made the cover of Time magazine in 1945.

Mike the Headless Chicken Days.

They just called their festival what it was.

Grandpa, the Frozen Dead Guy, as he's known, is our most famous resident.

And everybody knew what it was.

Everyone was familiar with story.

So we should call our festival Frozen Dead Guy Days.

And it caught it just.

It just there's.

I don't know what it is you say frozen dead guy and people are like, what is that about?

[Music] My job was to come up with a fun image to represent the festival came up with, I thought, a very unique kind of coffin shaped image.

And then I cheated and looked in through some historical books and combined some bodies and faces to create the original grandpa.

He became the image for like different story themes.

Each year had it sort of a different story theme.

[Music] [Music] You know the first festival was very small.

It was all local volunteers.

So you start out with the Royal Blue Ball on Friday night.

I remember the grandpa look alike contest it was a sheet of plywood, four by six with a hole cut in it.

We had the hearse parade, which was hilarious on First Street, and there was one guy that always came up every year.

He had a big mohawk with a hearse that had a flame flamethrower.

[Music] Then it went over to Chipeta Park for the coffin race.

The coffin races was the big deal.

Everyone came to watch the coffin races.

Racing their coffins around in the snow, in the mud and the ice and everything.

The premiere of that here at Frozen Dead Guy Days, the coffin races, theres some crazy contraption that people put together and they're racing through mud and snow and it's freezing cold.

It looks kind of miserable, but it's a lot of fun to watch.

[Music and people cheering] That was the main event on that but you also have side events.

People were just saying, okay, what can we do?

What can we do that's frozen?

There was frozen turkey bowling.

There was the frozen salmon toss.

And of course, my favorite was the frozen T-shirt contest.

[Music] You get a frozen t-shirt in a bag and it's been soaked with water and frozen, and you have to thaw it and try to get it on.

The first one gets it on actually wins.

[Music] [Music and people cheering] And we had the polar plunge.

That's where costumes started.

We are here with Wonder Woman.

How are you doing Wonder Woman?

Good.

How are you?

And what are you what are you about to do?

I'm about to polar plunge into a freezing cold lake in the Super Woman outfit.

You're going to jump in there.

You betcha.

Why would you do that?

Because we're crazy.

There's a dead guy in the Tuff Shed.

That's why [Cheering] People would do these elaborate entries into the water.

We put everything we had into it saying, let's make this artistically high quality.

That was really the magic, I think, behind Frozen Dead Guy Days, that bled out into the experience.

People working really hard and caring about it.

Just like any festival in its initial stage, it was funky, underground, controversial.

Half the town hated it, the other half liked it.

You know.

That was the first year and we still had 1700 people here.

It was an exciting energy and then all the businesses were so happy about it because they made enough money that they felt not so anxious about the dead time to come.

[Music fades] [Music] Right away, even in 2005, we had thousands of people there.

For years, I don't know how or if they even advertised.

It was just word of mouth.

And then it slowly got out on the web, you know?

Hi, Nederland.

How are you doing?

It's Tom Green here.

I'm hanging out with Frozen Burrito.

I mean, we have reporters from The New York Times here.

Yeah, we got USA Today top five cultural festival in the country and just top ten in the world.

What I loved over the years was where people came from.

There was news crews coming from Australia and from Japan.

[Japanese announcer yelling] [Crowd cheering and splash] [Japanese announcer yelling] [Crowd cheering and splash] We started to get a good draw from Denver and I just really feel like that started to bring in a whole nother element.

I love that about Frozen Dead Guy Days, you could be standing next to a seven year old or you can be standing next to us 90 year old and everybody's dressed like unicorns and they're dancing in the streets and we're dancing together.

It just took on a life of its own and it grew every year.

[Music] [Music] The chamber itself disbanded and I bought it.

And the first year, 90 mile an hour winds on Saturday.

[Loud wind] Port-O-Lets blowing down the street, The tent was shredded.

This is like we have to... We have to postpone.

And then the next year, foot and a half is snow on Saturday, all roads to Nederland closed.

[Laughter] [Snow blowing in wind] The next year, a water main blew on Friday.

[Water spraying] This is the six inch water main that burst on Friday evening.

It started as just a percolation above the surface, but below the surface a much bigger deal.

All the water was shut off to Nederland.

I was like, Are you kidding me?

If it could go wrong, it went wrong.

[Music fades] [Music] It was always kind of a small mountain festival.

A few thousand people that would come up each year, but attendance went crazy the past few years.

It got really big.

It just blew up.

[Music] In 2018, I was asked to come back and be the town parade marshal or something and have my VIP pass, but even I had a hard time getting into the tents to get a beer and.

[Music] You couldn't get into a music tent if you tried.

[Music] It was 10,000.

Then it was 15,000, I think last year the last time it was almost 23,000 people attended in that weekend.

I think when it was smaller, it was really well supported by the town.

And then I think as it got larger and bigger and more people, it just got harder to manage.

Nederland is a community of 1500, so we only have the infrastructure to support 1500.

I think as government officials, we really started to wrestle with how do we manage that?

And we knew at that point it had outgrown us.

[Cheering crowds, music fades] [Birds chirping] Fast breaking developments in the Corona virus emergency in the US and around the world.

The number of cases soaring just today.

2020 was kind of the camel's back.

March of 2020, the world changed.

Breaking news, stay at home.

That is the order tonight.

Those orders cover 75 million people across the United States.

All the bands booked, all the artwork done, everything was ready to go and they shut us down.

[Music] We're covering Colorado First in Nederland tonight, where this weekend, one of Colorado's strangest and most widely known events is back, Frozen Dead Guy Days.

It's been canceled for the past two years due to COVID.

We were pretty sure that this was only the last and final grand hurrah.

In November, Dias de los Muertos, I announced that we weren't coming back.

It was a very hard decision for me.

I mean, I really hoped that we could work things out, but ultimately I think they didn't want a big event and they didn't want all that parking and traffic.

New tonight, we have learned that one of Colorado's best known oddball events is going quiet.

Frozen Dead Guy Days is canceled next year.

The people behind it say there were issues with things like security, but the town put the nail in the coffin when it said it would no longer work with the festival's owners again Personally, it was hard for me because, again, I grew up here, so I know what this festival was like.

I remember going to the first one and it just didnt, it didn't pan out.

[Music] [Birds and music] I always thought it was a great festival and I have followed it for 15, 20 years.

And I sat there with my friend from Nederland and we had three beers.

He goes, the festival's dead and gone, and then we saw it on the news that there was irreconcilable differences between the founders and the town and the economics.

I go, Let's buy the festival, because all the things that don't make it work there we have the infrastructure to do here.

This town was built for tourism.

We have a 50,000 person rodeo.

We have a 40,000 person Scottish festival.

We handle 8 million visitors that go to the park.

And on a weird scale, this is about a nine and a half out of ten.

And if anybody can pull this off, that's probably the Stanley Hotel.

We do weird well.

[Axe chop and scream] I'm actually looking for the weirdness of the festival to make Estes Park a little weirder.

[Music] [Music] It's quite an event.

Saw a lot of interesting costume running around.

It's almost like Halloween in the spring.

[Cheering] One of the big things for us was to pay homage to Nederland, you know, the birthplace of this incredible festival.

I still want that Nederland connection.

[Music] My heart applauds the idea that there's people still want absurd and crazy things to celebrate and use as an excuse to go dancing, drink and party.

Now the Blue Ball is in a ballroom at the Stanley Hotel, which is absolutely fantastic.

Overall there's a little bittersweet, but it was fantastic.

I think they knocked it out of the ballpark.

[Music] It's been a great honor to throw Frozen Dead Guy Days.

It was such a unique opportunity.

I was almost like, in a way, flattered by the level of the production.

[Music] When you look at the festival where it was in Nederland, it's not going to be the exact same execution in Estes Park, there are two different towns with two different kinds of vibes and foundations.

Yes, they're coming for the 30 bands.

Yes, they're coming for all the same races and a hearse parade and all the other things that they did in Nederland.

There's all this fun, weird, quirky stuff happening, but really legitimate bands.

[Music] Now that Frozen Dead Guy Days is an Estes I love it.

And I just think the whole setup with the tents, the whole fairground over here is perfect for it.

I love it.

The central location The central location of everything in one spot is nice.

Yeah.

It had definitely grown, outgrown Nederland.

So I think with with this venue, they have room to grow and more people hear about it every year.

I think that's the goal, the ultimate goal was to keep that festival alive and that is what has happened.

And for that I'm thrilled.

[Music] The festival lives on.

Grandpa is going to be somewhere in some way preserved.

[Music] [Music] Frozen Dead Guy Days is a true, truly unique and magical event.

It is something bigger than all of us.

Maybe kind of like death itself.

Why the heck do you go to a festival about dead guys?

Right, you know.

It sorta goes along the lines of memento mori, that reminds you that one day you're going to die and it sort of changes your approach to life.

I think it's really important for Colorado to really understand what it means to be a dead guy.

[Music]