Meet The Frozen Dead Guy
But in 1993, for reasons I have not been able to fully ascertain (Trans Time still has a website (that looks like it was designed by a high school student in 1999) and their phone message still indicates such a thing as ‘Trans Time’ exists), Trygve took Bredo out of storage in San Leandro and moved him to Nederland Colorado.
What’s in Nederland? Not much. Tucked away in the mountains in the southwest corner of the state, Nederlands has a population of under 1500; it’s one of those communities that exists to get skiers and other outdoorsy types to their destination. If you wanted to know what kind of people live in Nederland, you should know that the town was the first in Colorado to straight up legalize marijuana.
Trygve and his mom, Aud, set up shop in Nederland, hoping to build their own cryonic facility. They put Bredo on dry ice (again) and built a shed to store him. But then disaster struck: Trygve was deported for overstaying his Visa. Mom stayed behind, but things soon got tough for her; she was living in an unfinished house, taking care of Bredo’s corpse, but the home didn’t have electricity or running water. That was against local ordinances, so she was evicted from the place, and that’s when everybody discovered the frozen dead guy in the shed.
See, mom went to the local media with her fear - that her eviction would cause Bredo to thaw out. And so began the Frozen Dead Guy saga. Nederland, caught without any law on the books to discourage people from freezing their deceased in sheds, passed one that would outlaw any future home cryonics experiments. They kindly grandfathered Bredo in.
For a couple of years Bredo just stayed frozen in peace. Trygve hired a rinky dink, very Nederland-flavored company called Delta Tech (who also have a web page out of the early HTML days) to keep Bredo supplied with fresh dry ice. Bredo’s original home was a tin shed, but that got rickety and creaky and the local people of Nederland, being the local people of Nederland, took up his cause. They got Tuff Shed to donate a brand new structure to Bredo, and there he still sits, inside an aluminum box within a styrofoam crate, chilled to -60 degrees Fahrenheit.
[caption id=“attachment_7226” align=“aligncenter” width=“568” caption=“A look at Bredo's casket, covered in frost and ice.”]
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But eventually the Nederlanders decided they loved having a frozen dead guy in their midst, so they began celebrating him in an annual event: Frozen Dead Guy Daze. Held in March, the festival combines music, drinking and silly winter events like coffin races and a swim in the local frozen lake. The big dance party is known as ‘Grandpa’s Blue Ball.’ The next Frozen Dead Guy Daze is scheduled for March 4th through 6th; as you can see from the official event page at the Nederland Chamber of Commerce the first event that you can attend is the Re-Animate Yourself Beer Tent, which serves local microbrews. Sounds like our kind of festival.
Meanwhile Bredo remains frozen. There was some friction between Trygve and Nederland back in 2005, when he seemed poised to sue them for making money on his grandfather, but apparently that’s all been straightened out. Trygve hasn’t returned to the United States since he was deported, and Aud is now there with him. Grandpa Bredo is in the hands of Delta Tech and their cryonics expert, who goes by the reassuringly scientific name of The Iceman.
When we think of cryonic freezing we think of Walt Disney in a high tech ice vault deep beneath Main Street at Disneyland. But Bredo is the other end of the spectrum, wrapped in cardboard box insulation and with his dry ice replenished by hand every few years. It’s DIY life extension, kept running by - if the pictures on the Delta Tech site are any indication - a ragtag crew of mountain hippies and snowboard types. But it’s Grandpa Bredo who is going to have the last laugh; just imagine the rager they’ll throw at the last Frozen Dead Guy Daze the year they thaw him out.