For the last two decades, Frozen Dead Guy Days has been a staple event for the town of Nederland. But three years ago, the festival moved to Estes Park, and Nederland continues to figure out its identity following the departure of its most famous tradition.
The weekend-long festival — complete with a polar plunge, a parade of hearses, costume contests, live music, and its famous ‘coffin races’ where teams race each other carrying homemade coffins over a muddy obstacle course through town — helped put the 1.6-square-mile mountain town on the map.
“You can be anywhere in the world and some people will know when you say ‘Nederland Colorado,’ that Frozen Dead Guy Days takes place here,” said Stephanie Andelman, a longtime festival worker and enthusiast.
While on the surface, the festival is about a 120-year-old frozen dead guy – Bredo Morstøl, or colloquially known as “Grandpa Bredo,” who died in 1989 and has since been kept frozen in a cryogenic storage shed in Nederland — the festival was actually started to boost tourism. The now-disbanded Nederland Chamber of Commerce developed the idea in 2002 after the municipality’s leaders decided they needed to bring more revenue into town during the slow winter months.
Initially, the plan worked. According to Andelman, who has been involved with the festival shortly after its founding in the early 2000s, just a few years after its debut, the festival began attracting national media attention.
“I don't want to say it exploded, but it grew from a couple hundred people to a couple thousand people,” she said.
Despite the quirky festival bringing media, visitors and some extra revenue into the tiny mountain town, many Nederland locals grew less and less fond of the attention.
“I spent a lot of time instead of working on the actual logistics of the festival, I would say 60 percent of my time would be fighting with the town, which was really interesting,” said Amanda MacDonald, the former longtime owner and organizer of the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival.
MacDonald bought the festival rights from the Nederland Chamber of Commerce after the chamber dissolved in 2011. Since then, running the festival not only became a huge passion of hers — it took over her life.
“It was extremely stressful and I literally sold my house to pay off debt,” MacDonald said. “... My father said ‘That f****** festival ruined your life.’ I couldn't sleep and I had to lean on people a lot. It was almost immature in a lot of ways, but that's what made it kind of special — we just kind of made it up as we went along.”
But between the largely disorganized revelry of inebriated visitors showing up by the busloads, locally owned restaurants struggling to keep up with suddenly high demand, and mud-splattered coffin race competitors racing through town, Nederland decided it had had enough.
“I just think [the festival] distasteful,” said one local store worker, who asked to be kept anonymous.
“It just got to be too big,” said Tony Butikofer, a waiter at a local brewery. “You won’t see many locals on Frozen Dead Guy Days unless they were workers. A lot of times, at least from my experience, people are just like, ‘I'm not coming to town, I'm not dealing with that traffic.’”
“For the first couple of years [of the festival], you either attended as an attendee or you worked it or you hid … It’s a gift and a curse in of itself,” Tim Dillon, a longtime worker at the festival and Nederland local said.
Dillon initially moved to Nederland over a decade ago to escape to a quiet mountain town, away from the hustle and bustle of nearby bigger cities like Denver and Boulder.
“It's great and a treasure, but then everybody comes and wants to ruin it,” he said
Between the overall growing discontentment around the festival and MacDonald and her new festival co-owner running out of money, the festival was sold to Estes Park.
“I call it my bad divorce really, or a little bit of a custody battle,” MacDonald said.
And with it, so went Grandpa Bredo.
For the last three decades, the Norwegian man who died from a heart condition in 1989 rested, frozen, in Nederland.
After his passing, his daughter and grandson — both proponents of cryonics, the practice of deep-freezing the deceased in hopes that scientific advances will allow for future resurrection, shipped his body from Norway to a facility in Oakland, California. A few years later, Grandpa Bredo’s grandson, Trygve Bauge, moved his grandfather to his backyard in Nederland where he stored his remains in a cryogenic storage shed.
That’s how Brad Wickham became involved.
Wickham was Grandpa Bredo’s caretaker for the last 11 years and was also responsible for coordinating moving his remains from a shed in Nederland to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park in 2023. Every other week for over a decade, Wickham would haul thousands of pounds of ice from a warehouse in Denver, through mountain passes, to keep Bredo’s remains frozen.
“It was long and tumultuous,” Wickham said of the decade he spent taking care of Grandpa Bredo’s body. “And the day that I didn't have to do it anymore was the best day of my life.”
Despite being one of the most heavily involved individuals in the namesake of the Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival, Wickham says he “couldn’t wait” for the festival to leave town.
“The festival never embraced me,” Wickham said. “They wanted me to spend my entire day taking dignitaries up to see Grandpa and not even be a part of the festival. After a while that got contentious.”
Wickham, who says he struggled with addiction prior to moving to Nederland, says he initially struggled to find work in the small mountain town.
"I came here with problems with alcohol and drugs and escaped to Colorado in Nederland,” he said. “I was having difficulty finding gainful employment, so I took odd jobs, and the last [Grandpa Bredo] caretaker was fired. And long story short, someone just suggested that I take it, and at the time, I thought the money sounded good until I realized all that it entailed. And believe me, the money was not good. It was $150 for each delivery. It took three hours, over 120 miles of driving… So I was stuck with it and couldn't find anybody to take it over. I tried and tried and tried and tried. Other people were smarter than me and saw that it was much too much to handle for just what they were offering.”
Wickham never directly worked for the festival, but rather Grandpa Bredo’s grandson, Trygve Bauge. He says after the Stanley Hotel — which famously inspired Stephen King to write his 1977 novel The Shining — took over the caretaking aspect of Grandpa Bredo’s remains, for the first time in over a decade he was able to “live life.” He’s now semi-retired and occasionally works at a gas station.
“When I went back to the shed and saw it empty, I rejoiced. I literally danced,” Wickham said after helping move Grandpa Bredo’s remains from Nederland to Estes Park. “The Stanley rescued the festival, and if it weren't for them, it would be a memory.”
Today, Grandpa Bredo rests in a 12-foot-tall steel tank filled with liquid nitrogen and set to -320 degrees in the Stanley Hotel’s historic ice house which has since become the “International Cryonics Museum.” Visitors can take a tour of the museum and Grandpa Bredo’s resting place for $20.
Despite some Nederland locals saying they’re “relieved” that the festival moved on, there are still a few who say they will miss it.
“We never had any trouble from it or anything,” said Mike Parker, who has worked at Nature’s Own, a crystal shop, for over 20 years. “I know something's missing.”
Andelman said she plans to help Estes Park with the transition. For the last few years, she has been heavily involved in making sure organizers at the Estes Park Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival retain the quirkiness of the original festival.
“I have experience in everything and I was like, ‘I am here if you need me, we need to figure out a way to work together’,” Andelman said. “I don't know if they wanted to accept me, but I'm not just Nederland; I am Frozen Dead Guy Day. It is an event that came from years and years and of effort, so let's figure out how it can continue on that path.”
This year the festival will be held on Saturday, March 15 at the Estes Park Events Complex. But according to the organizers, there will be Frozen Dead Guy Day-themed activities the entire weekend, to keep with the tradition of the former Nederland-based festival.
