Skiing, A Frozen Dead Guy, and Matt Wertz

This past Saturday we had a quite an eventful day. It began with a morning of skiing at Eldora.


Immediately after skiing, we met up with our friend who lives in Nederland (the town Eldora is in) and went to a local festival called Frozen Dead Guy Days. The following excerpt from Wikipedia summarizes the story which was the inspiration for the festival:

In 1989, a Norwegian citizen named Trygve Bauge brought the corpse of his recently deceased grandfather, Bredo Morstøl, to the United States. The body was preserved on dry ice for the trip, and stored in liquid nitrogen at the Trans Time cryonics facility from 1990 to 1993.

In 1993, Bredo was returned to dry ice and transported to the town of Nederland, where Trygve and his mother Aud planned to create a cryonics facility of their own. When Trygve was deported from the United States for overstaying his visa, his mother, Aud, continued keeping her father's body cryogenically frozen in a shack behind her unfinished house.

Aud was eventually evicted from her home for living in a house with no electricity or plumbing, in violation of local ordinances. At that time, she told a local reporter about her father's body, and the reporter went to the local city hall in order to let them know about Aud's fears that her eviction would cause her father's body to thaw out.

To this day, Grandpa is still frozen inside a Tuff Shed in Nederland and the Frozen Dead Guy Days apparently celebrates this bizarre situation. Neither of us had ever been to the festival but had heard that the coffin races was the most entertaining part of the weekend. The races were actually quite similar to "The Push" - the shopping cart race which started during my time at Hope College, where the point of the event is the hilarious costumes and not who wins.

This is the NASA team. Unfortunately the coffin crash-landed in the first round and they were eliminated.

My personal favorite was the Double-Dare team, which celebrated one of my favorite childhood TV shows.

The most hilariously dressed team was the Octumom team called "Eight Isn't Enough." Inside the coffin was a woman and eight baby dolls and the people carrying the coffins were all wearing diapers.

Saturday night we then went to see Matt Wertz at the Fox Theatre in Boulder with Laurel, our friend from Hope, and her boyfriend Dominic. This was the third time we had seen Matt Wertz at the Fox as he is Becky's favorite musician and he always puts on a very good live show. He also has to be one of the nicest guys in music as he uses the stage as a platform to share about the mission work in Africa he is involved with, and allows fans to take a CD from his merch table if they sign up to give to the mission. You can kind of see him between Laurel and Becky's heads.


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