Frozen Dead Guy Days for Sale

Jun 16, 2011 | 0 comments

Gail Rubin at Frozen Dead Guy Days

Chillin’ out in Nederland

I have a warm spot in my heart for Frozen Dead Guy Days, having presented “The Newly-Dead Game” there back in March. Then I see the festival is for sale! But it sounds like Grandpa will still be hangin’ in the Tuff Shed.

Here’s a news story about it in the Boulder Daily Camera:

For sale: Nederland’s Frozen Dead Guy Days festival

Chamber of commerce seeks event company to take over quirky festival
By Laura Snider, Camera Staff Writer

The Nederland Area Chamber of Commerce is looking to get out of the business of celebrating a corpsicle to do more of what other chambers do: nurture the local business community.

The Nederland chamber has put the town’s annual Frozen Dead Guy Days up for sale.

The 10-year-old March festival is, literally, a tribute to a frozen dead guy. Grandpa Bredo Morstoel’s corpse has been packed in dry ice inside a Tuff Shed in the quirky mountain town since 1993. Morstoel’s Norwegian family hopes that the necessary technology eventually will be developed to thaw and “reanimate” him.

“We’re trying to move the chamber more into business development,” said Blue Hessner, interim president of the chamber’s board. “It’s such a big event. It takes so much money and man hours — it’s just exhausting.”

To some degree, the chamber recently has acted more like a traditional event company, putting on the High Peaks Art Festival, the Neder-Nederland 5k and 10k race and Oktoberfest.

Now, Frozen Dead Guy Days has grown so large — bringing 15,000 people to the festival this year — that it’s time to hand off the torch, or frozen turkey, as the case may be, to a professional, Hessner said.

“We’ve gotten to the point where we feel like an event company would do a better job,” he said. “The one thing we don’t want — we don’t want to sell it to somebody and have them move it out of Nederland. We want to keep it in the community, and we want to see it thrive.”

A Good Goodbye