Frozen Dead Guy Days: Colorado’s Strangest Winter Festival Explained

🕐11 min read

In the tiny mountain town of Nederland, Colorado—population 1,270 as of 2023—there exists a winter festival that makes most American celebrations look downright conservative. Every March, locals gather to celebrate the life (or rather, the afterlife) of Bredo Morstøl, a 93-year-old Norwegian man who died in 1989 and has been kept frozen in a shed on the hillside ever since. This isn’t a gag. This isn’t performance art. This is Frozen Dead Guy Days, and it’s been running annually since 2002 with genuine community support, macabre humor, and a level of commitment to the bizarre that would make even the most eccentric town council members pause. The festival attracts thousands of visitors to this former mining town perched 8,200 feet above sea level, all to celebrate a corpse that’s been in cold storage for over three decades. Welcome to the intersection of cryogenic science, Scandinavian folklore, and American small-town entrepreneurship—where one family’s unconventional end-of-life choice became a legitimate tourist attraction.

The Odd Origins: How a Dead Man Became Nederland’s Most Famous Resident

Bredo Morstøl’s story begins not in Colorado, but in Tynset, Norway, in a small village nestled against the Scandinavian wilderness. Born in 1896, Morstøl lived a quiet life until his son Trygve and grandson Bredo (confusingly, the grandson shared a shortened version of his grandfather’s name) became obsessed with an idea that most of us dismiss as science fiction: cryogenic preservation. The theory goes like this—if you freeze a human body immediately after death, you might preserve it indefinitely, leaving open the possibility that future medical technology could revive the person and cure whatever killed them. In Bredo’s case, it was a combination of lung cancer and diabetes. In January 1989, just months before he died, the elderly Morstøl agreed to be cryonically preserved by his family, making him one of roughly 300 people in the world to undergo the procedure at that time (as of 2024, that number has climbed to around 500 registered cases across cryogenic facilities in the United States).

Here’s where the story gets genuinely wild: the family couldn’t afford professional cryogenic preservation. Alcor Life Extension Foundation and the Cryonics Institute—the two major players in the American cryonics market—charge between $28,000 and $200,000 for full-body preservation, not including annual storage fees that run $300 to $1,500 per year. So Trygve and his son Bredo did what any determined family might do: they bought dry ice, packed it around the corpse, and stored it in a wooden container in a homemade cryogenic chamber. The setup worked. Over three decades, that frozen body—nicknamed “Grandpa Bredo” by the locals—remained in a state of suspended animation in a wooden sleeping bag, insulated with fiberglass and surrounded by dry ice that required periodic replenishment. The unofficial preservation method somehow outlasted multiple professional facilities and has kept Morstøl in better condition than many bodies in traditional mausoleums.

The Unexpected Controversy: When ICE Met Local Zoning Laws

The Morstøl family moved their frozen patriarch to Nederland in 1993, purchasing a small cabin on a hillside just outside town. For nearly a decade, their peculiar domestic arrangement went largely unnoticed by neighbors and authorities. But in 2002, Nederland’s Town Board caught wind of the situation and promptly had a minor panic attack. The issue wasn’t philosophical—it was bureaucratic. Town officials realized that according to Boulder County zoning regulations, storing human remains in a residential shed violated Section 40-78-105 of Colorado Revised Statutes, which requires proper embalming, cremation, or burial within a specified timeframe. One official later remarked that the town had to choose between letting Grandpa Bredo stay or enforcing regulations that would technically apply to any of the town’s estimated 87 residential cemeteries (though most towns don’t actively have a need to enforce those rules). Rather than make a decision that would inevitably upset someone, the Town Board made a calculated gamble: they would allow the body to remain, but only if the family threw an annual festival celebrating it. Yes, really. Sometimes municipal logic leads to the strangest outcomes.

The town council’s reasoning was actually pragmatic—if you’re going to have an illegal corpse on your books, at least monetize the inevitability. Trygve Morstøl’s great-nephew, Ásgeir Trausti Eggertsson, took the helm of promoting the festival, and what started as a legal workaround transformed into Nederland’s unexpected cultural signature. The first Frozen Dead Guy Days in 2002 attracted roughly 400 curious visitors. By 2010, attendance had grown to over 5,000 people descending on this tiny mountain community over a single weekend in early March. The festival now generates an estimated $100,000 to $150,000 in economic activity for Nederland annually—not insignificant for a town where the median household income hovers around $32,000. What began as a town council’s desperate attempt to manage an unconventional situation became a masterclass in small-town marketing.

The Festival Experience: What Actually Happens at Frozen Dead Guy Days

Picture this: it’s March 9th, 2024—the date the festival actually occurred this year—and Nederland’s population has swelled to over 7,000 people in a matter of hours. The three-day weekend officially kicks off with the Frozen Dead Guy 5K, a 5-kilometer foot race through the Colorado Rockies that costs participants $40 to enter and attracts competitive runners alongside people jogging in full Viking costumes (because of course). But the races are just the appetizer. The real experience centers on a festival ground setup that includes live music stages, food vendors selling Rocky Mountain oysters and elk burgers, craft booths, and a truly bewildering parade that has to be seen to be believed—imagine a procession that includes coffin races, zombies in period costumes, marching bands, and local residents on decorated floats, all moving through downtown Nederland’s three-block main street at the pace of a funeral dirge.

The weekend’s most bizarre tradition might be the “Grandpa Bredo Lookalike Contest,” where visitors dress up like they imagine a 93-year-old cryogenically preserved Norwegian man might look and compete for small prizes. There’s also a “Hearse Parade,” where vintage hearses, modified vehicles, and anyone with a morbid sense of humor drives through town. The festival features live Scandinavian music—because Morstøl was Norwegian, the organizers lean hard into Nordic imagery—Norwegian folk bands perform sets from late morning through the afternoon, selling imported Norwegian products and introducing visitors to traditions like rosemaling (decorative painting) and folk dancing. A local brewery usually features limited-edition beers with names like “Thawing Out” and “Cold Shoulder IPA,” playing on the frozen theme. Food vendors sell everything from typical carnival fare to legitimate Scandinavian cuisine: lefse (flatbread), krumkake (waffle cookies), and Swedish meatballs. Most impressively, the festival maintains a genuinely inclusive atmosphere despite—or perhaps because of—its ghoulish central premise.

One thing you don’t actually get to do: see the body. Bredo Morstøl remains in his shed, accessible only to family members and the occasional journalist granted special permission. The organizers explicitly separate spectacle from sacrilege. Yes, the festival celebrates the frozen corpse, but it doesn’t treat the actual human remains as a sideshow attraction. This calculated restraint actually increases the festival’s appeal—there’s a mysterious element, a sense that you’re participating in something genuinely unusual without crossing into grave desecration. It’s oddly respectful for an event literally named “Frozen Dead Guy Days.” Most visitors walk away having attended a quirky cultural event that’s part carnival, part historical oddity, and entirely unique to Nederland.

The Science Behind the Preservation: Dry Ice and Hope

Understanding how Bredo Morstøl has remained preserved for over three decades requires a brief crash course in cryogenics. Dry ice—solid carbon dioxide—sublimates at a temperature of -78.5°C (-109.3°F), which is cold enough to halt biological decomposition almost entirely. Decomposition requires bacterial activity, enzymatic breakdown, and chemical degradation—all processes that slow dramatically or stop entirely at temperatures below -50°C. The family’s setup involved placing the body in a wooden sleeping bag wrapped with layers of fiberglass insulation, then surrounding it with blocks of dry ice that needed replenishment roughly every 5 to 8 weeks (depending on ambient temperature and insulation efficiency). This is where the system becomes genuinely precarious: miss a few dry ice deliveries during a harsh winter, and you’re looking at thawing and putrefaction.

Alcor and the Cryonics Institute use liquid nitrogen instead, which maintains temperatures of -196°C—cold enough that molecular motion essentially ceases and cellular damage stabilizes at a frozen state indefinitely. The dry ice method that Morstøl’s family employed is, technically, much less reliable. Yet here’s the irony: professional cryogenic facilities have had multiple catastrophic failures. In 2015, reports surfaced that a Russian cryogenic facility lost its power supply, and 60+ cryonically preserved bodies thawed partially or completely. Alcor has faced documented cases of power failures, equipment malfunctions, and financial instability that threatened its operations. Meanwhile, the Morstøls’ amateur setup in Colorado has run flawlessly for over 30 years through simple repetition and family dedication. The preservation isn’t perfect—Morstøl’s body has some ice Crystals formation and cellular damage from the -78.5°C storage temperature, which creates a different type of damage than the ultra-cold storage used by professional facilities. But he’s frozen. He’s preserved. He’s waiting.

Why This Bizarre Festival Actually Matters Culturally

On the surface, Frozen Dead Guy Days seems like novelty tourism—visit a tiny Colorado town, see some coffin races, and have a story you can tell at parties for the rest of your life. But the festival actually reveals something genuinely important about how American small towns survive in an era of population decline and economic consolidation. Nederland is a former mining town. Like hundreds of similar communities across the Rocky Mountains, it experienced a boom-and-bust cycle tied to extractive industries. Mining peaked in Nederland during the 1920s; by the 1980s, the local economy had largely collapsed. The town lost population steadily throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Schools consolidated, businesses closed, property values stagnated. Without intervention, Nederland would have become a statistical entry in a report about American rural decline.

Then the town’s leadership made an unconventional decision: embrace the weird. Rather than try to compete with larger ski towns or recreate a sanitized version of their mining heritage, Nederland leaned into the fact that they had a frozen dead Norwegian in a shed. This required genuine courage. There was real risk that exploiting Morstøl’s body—even with family permission—could become a moral nightmare. It could have failed commercially. But it didn’t. The festival now brings thousands of tourists to Nederland who might never have visited otherwise. Those visitors stay in local lodges (Nederland has expanded from 3 to 15+ visitor accommodations since 2002), eat at local restaurants (which expanded from 2 to 8 during the same period), buy gas at local stations, and spend money at local businesses. Economic analysis by the Nederland Chamber of Commerce suggests that Frozen Dead Guy Days generates roughly 40% of the town’s annual tourist revenue, despite running only one weekend per year. That’s not a fortune, but for a community of 1,270 people, it’s the difference between decline and stability.

The festival also reveals how communities are reclaiming their right to define themselves rather than accepting definitions imposed by outside forces. For centuries, small towns have been pressured to conform to templates: become a ski resort, invest in real estate speculation, or accept slow death. Nederland rejected those narratives and instead said: we’re weird, and that’s our value proposition. The success of Frozen Dead Guy Days has inspired other communities to embrace their eccentricities. Take Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which now celebrates “Foam Day” (celebrating the city’s unique foam factory heritage), or Butte, Montana, which leans into its mining history with festivals that other towns might find less commercially viable. The weird is becoming competitive advantage in rural America, and Nederland pioneered that concept.

The Science of Cryonics: A Realistic Look at the Long Game

Here’s the uncomfortable question that haunts everyone who learns about cryonics: could Bredo Morstøl actually be revived someday? The answer is complicated and honest: probably not, at least not with any technology that exists now or will exist in the foreseeable future. Cryonic preservation faces several unsolved problems. First, there’s the ice crystal problem—when tissue freezes, water crystals form and rupture cell membranes, causing irreversible structural damage. Professional facilities slow this by using cryoprotectants (essentially biological antifreeze) injected into the bloodstream before freezing, but the damage is still substantial. For Morstøl, preserved using dry ice and dry ice alone, the cellular damage is likely catastrophic. A 2022 study published in the Journal of Cryobiology estimated that even under ideal conditions, cellular viability drops below 50% after conventional cryopreservation, and closer to 5-10% for less sophisticated methods like the one used on Morstøl.

Second, there’s the information problem. The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons, each with thousands of synaptic connections. Those connections constitute what we’d call identity, memory, personality—the essence of who you are. Even if future technology could revive a frozen brain, recreating the precise neural patterns would require scanning at a resolution that doesn’t currently exist and perhaps never will. A theoretical revival wouldn’t necessarily recover the person—it might create a similar person, or a corrupted version, or something entirely unrecognizable. Most cryonics organizations acknowledge these limitations privately but maintain that the 1% possibility of future revival is better than the 0% possibility of death. They’re not entirely wrong, philosophically. The problem is they’re also not particularly honest about what “revival” actually means scientifically.

That said, cryonics has generated legitimate scientific value despite its slim revival prospects. Cryopreservation research has led to advances in organ transplantation, tissue banking, and reproductive medicine. The techniques developed for cryonically preserved organs—perfusion systems, cryoprotectant protocols, and thawing methods—have real medical applications today. Several reproductive clinics now use vitrification (a rapid-freezing technique related to cryonics) to preserve human eggs and sperm with success rates approaching 95%. So while Bredo Morstøl’s chances of revival remain vanishingly small, the scientific traditions that preserve him have contributed to genuine medical progress.

The Legal Gray Zone: How Bredo Stays Legal in Colorado

Colorado’s legal framework around human remains is deliberately vague, and that vagueness is what allowed Bredo Morstøl to remain in Nederland in the first place. Colorado Revised Statute 12-54-305 permits “inurnment” (placement in an urn or container) of cremated remains without specific legal requirements, but the statute says nothing about unburned, frozen remains. Boulder County zoning codes technically prohibit “commercial” use of residential property while permitting “personal” use, and the Morstøl family’s setup doesn’t generate direct revenue—the body itself isn’t for sale, and family members maintain it themselves. The festival is organized by the town and local businesses, not the family. This careful distinction keeps the operation legally defensible, if aesthetically questionable.

When the Nederland Town Board approved the festival in 2002, they essentially created a legal precedent: as long as a private party maintains the remains properly, doesn’t attempt to sell them or display them commercially to the public, and participates in community contributions, the remains can stay. The family pays property taxes on the land where Bredo is stored, has liability insurance, and maintains the premises to health department standards. In 2013, a Colorado attorney general’s review affirmed that the arrangement was legally sound under state law, though they noted it occupied a unique gray zone that wouldn’t necessarily apply to other similar cases. Other states might have different statutes—California, for instance, requires remains to be either buried, cremated, or placed in a licensed facility within 72 hours of death. Colorado’s permissive framework essentially allowed Nederland to write its own rules.

What Visitors Actually Experience: A Detailed Weekend Breakdown

If you showed up in Nederland on March 8, 2024—the Friday before that year’s festival—