Greetings, virtual friends! This is Christopher’s friend, Emily, and I’m hijacking the blog today. I hope you don’t mind. Christopher and I have been friends for several years. One of our favorite activities is to take field trips together to unique locales, important historical sites and interesting festivals. Unfortunately, Christopher was unable to accompany me on this weekend’s excursion, but I thought it was so unique that I wanted to chronicle the events of the day and he relented to letting me post it on the blog.
To preface, I live in the great state of Colorado; a state diverse in culture and scenery. By culture, I mean to say that there are many varieties of white people. In the small town of Nederland we encountered the endangered subtype of white people classified as “Dirty Mountain Hippies.” As opposed to the species of white people found downstream in Boulder, the less elusive “Dirty Educated Trust-Fund Hippies,” these mountain hippies can be distinguished by the fact that they actually live in shanties, and drink Miller Lite. The “Dirty Educated Trust-Fund Hippies” only drink micro-brews and drive expensive hybrid cars. Both types can be found wearing dreadlocks and ugly ponchos.
My friend Cindy and I ventured up to Nederland today to partake in the festival called (and I am not making this up) “Frozen Dead Guy Days.” The celebration is a community festival that honors a man who is cryogenically frozen and kept in a Tuff Shed in the town. Apparently, after Grandpa Bredo died in Norway in 1989, his family arranged to have him transported to the U.S. and cryogenically frozen. They brought his body to the small mountain town of Nederland and kept him in a shed behind their house. Eventually the town discovered that the body was being kept frozen on their property. Because there was no ordinance against it at the time, the family has been allowed to keep their grandfather’s corpse frozen in the shed, aided by regular deliveries of dry ice. The townspeople began celebrating “Frozen Dead Guy Days” in 2002 in honor of Grandpa Bredo. It is a celebration of the macabre and the absurd, like Halloween in March.
I had never been to Nederland before. The drive up from Denver is quite beautiful. Past Boulder, you drive up the mountains on a pretty typical two-lane highway with lots of curves and several boulders that loom over the road on cliffs that look like they could fall and smash your car at any minute. But it was truly breathtaking, and we stopped to take our pictures by a frozen lake outside of town. The town itself was packed as we arrived. We found a place to park and then headed to town to line up with the hundreds of other people and waited for the parade to start. Then it started to snow. Really hard. The parade began with the winner of the Grandpa Bredo look-alike contest walking up the street. He was accompanied by this year’s Ice Queen who kept getting groped by onlookers. Their triumphant march was immediately followed by a multitude of old hearses from the Denver Hearse Club driving up the street. Did you know that Denver had a hearse club? Me neither. After watching the parade for ten minutes and seeing hearse after hearse, Cindy and I were covered in snow and very, very cold. So we headed into the nearest pub for lunch. Yet again, we got to watch some drunk guys try to grope the seating hostess. Dirty Mountain Hippies.
After lunch, we trekked downhill and followed the crowd of people to the next activity. In order to get to where it was held, we had to cross a very skinny bridge and then literally walk across part of the frozen river. We prayed that the ice would hold us, as we had just eaten a very big lunch. Do you remember fording the river while playing “Oregon Trail” in grade school computer class? It was a similar experience, minus the oxen and the cholera. We arrived just in time to watch the Polar Bear Plunge. If you aren’t familiar with this, it is an event wherein brain-damaged individuals think it’s a good idea to jump into a frozen river. The best part is that after diving into the frozen mountain river, the people emerge with looks on their faces that seem say “Holy crap! I didn’t realize this water was going to be so cold! I think maybe my nipples fell off somewhere in there!” Really? They didn’t realize when they signed up for this that the water was going to be COLD? The crowd cheers and laughs, as they are nice and warm and bundled up in their North Face jackets and sipping on their soy lattes, while the participants are struggling to keep the hypothermia from setting in. Each participant was generally costumed or had some other theme for their dive. There was a guy dressed like Superman, another guy in a suit who looked like he was getting baptized, some people who had painted the Norwegian flag on their stomachs, and there were even a few kids that took the plunge. But the best moment had to be when these two skanky hippie girls in bikinis were about to go on and as they were doing a faux striptease while de-robing, someone from the crowd shouted: “This isn’t Rock of Love, girls!” See, hippies can be funny, too!
After the Polar Bear plunge concluded, we walked over to the obstacle course that had been set up for the next event, the Coffin Races! The idea of the coffin races is that each team designs and builds a coffin to carry one of their teammates through a variety of obstacles, most of which are just big piles of snow. Each team also comes up with a theme and again, most are costumed. I am very tall, so I perched myself up on a rock and watched from behind a bush. Even though I could see through the bush, it made taking pictures somewhat difficult. In each heat two teams would race against each other. There were two separate “Octo-mom” teams this year, but this one was my favorite:
The “babies” are carrying their crazy-pants mother through the obstacles that they encounter. It’s really funny how art imitates life.
Here’s where the teams have to perform a Chinese fire drill around the coffins. This is team “Ground Control to Grandpa Bredo” competing against the “Corporate Zombies.”
We wandered around town for a big after the activities had ended. I had some really terrible hot chocolate and then we decided to drive back to Boulder. Of course, we paid the obligatory visit to Pearl Street (where we got to walk by some Hippies doing street performance! Oh joy!), we patronized the Dushanbe Teahouse. It’s a really unique place, and the décor is amazing. I had the Morrocan Mint tea and Cindy had some chai:
At this point, I must mention that Cindy had been talking to me ALL DAY about taking me to a particular cupcake shop in Denver after we got back into town. She promised that I would love it. So we chose to just drink some tea and save ourselves for the cupcakes that were awaiting us back in Denver. As we left, we were both excited for the cupcake ecstasy that would greet us upon our return to civilization. Little did I know that in deciding to get cupcakes, Cindy and I would be forced to become ninjas in our attempts to elude our arch-nemesis who just happened to be at the SAME CUPCAKE BAKERY!! What were the odds of that?? And so, we had to drive around the block several times while Cindy wore a disguise until She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had left the bakery. But it was worth it, because the cupcakes were amazing. I had a strawberry one and a chocolate one. Unfortunately, they are not open on Sundays, or I would probably be there today. On second thought, maybe it is fortunate after all.
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