“He didn’t know what the condition of his grandfather’s body would be like.” A chosen crew lifted Grandpa Bredo’s frozen metal coffin and moved him to the location of the viewing. PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER KELLEY AND BARBARA HARDT[/caption]

Tuesday, August 1, 2023. 3:30 p.m.

My editor-in-chief picked me up and began navigating us by memory through the labyrinthine Big Springs neighborhood, trying to find the infamous property. Trygve was on speakerphone, talking loudly, the excitement in his voice tripping the words as they tried to escape from his mouth. He spoke of his grandfather and how he had not laid eyes on him in several years; he didn’t know what the condition of his grandfather’s body would be like.

Finally, we found the correct driveway and parked off to the side, as we were expecting several others to arrive soon behind us. The man with the dry ice was running a little behind, as were members of his chosen crew who would help him to move the body. A film crew was also expected to arrive, to capture this phenomenon live as part of a documentary that’s been in production for more than five years.

We walk down a long dirt driveway and, with perfect horror movie timing, the gray clouds turn dark and open up just as the small, dilapidated concrete fort came into view.

Trygve continued to tell my editor-in-chief about his grandfather’s strange journey as she hid from the rain under a small awning made of rusted rebar. I waited with a few locals who were chosen to assist in the day’s task. Everyone was eager to begin what was going to be one of the weirdest, and undoubtedly most reverential, jobs that they had ever agreed to take.

The anticipation caused me to wander. The driveway continued past the fort and led to a small yard, where at the far end a gray Tuff Shed with red trim stood ominously, its doors shut, and a Norway flag on a pole twitching erratically in the storm.

I rejoined everyone as they huddled under the small awning and tried to guess what they were about to experience. Trygve’s email warned that they would be looking for any blackened skin or deterioration, so I was expecting to be witness to something disturbing.

The rain became fat enough to land with hearty, stinging slaps, and lightning crashed uncomfortably close to where we all waited.

Finally Brad Wickham, the man with the dry ice, arrived, with the film crew in a white van following closely behind him. Figures inside the white van shuffled quickly to wrap their cameras and equipment in protective gear, shielding them from the rain.

Brad quickly gathered his volunteers and explained the steps of the job: first, the old dry ice needs to be removed from Grandpa Bredo’s enclosure within the Tuff Shed; then at least four people need to lift and remove the metal “coffin” and carry it over to the fort; at this point bolt cutters will be needed in order to remove the chains wrapped around the coffin; then open the coffin and check the condition of the body.

The volunteers jumped to it, entered the Tuff Shed and opened the top of the large wooden enclosure that sat in the middle of the space, leaving very little room to get around it. The condensation from the dry ice wafted out and dissipated in the air as the group of six pulled bags and bags of the stuff off of Grandpa and stacked it to the side.

After about ten minutes Grandpa’s metal encasement was lifted from the wood enclosure and carried over to the concrete fort. Cold steam rose off of the coffin, which was stark white from frost.

The concrete fort was far from an ideal living space, let alone an ideal laboratory in which to make scientific observations on cryogenic experiments. The space was littered with seemingly random pieces of family memorabilia, from paintings to stuffed animals. Load bearing beams and wall studs were in place, though there were no walls.

The heavy chains coiled around the frigid metal tomb snapped easily to the pressure of the bolt cutters, and what was believed to be the top of Grandpa’s encasement was removed.

Inside, a blue REI sleeping bag was wrapped in foam insulation. The volunteers inspected the sleeping bag to find that a tag which indicated “Head”, was in fact placed on the wrong end. When unzipping the end of the sleeping bag where Grandpa’s head surely laid, it was revealed that Grandpa was upside down.

Without hesitation the coffin was closed back up, spun around, and opened again so that Grandpa’s body could properly be revealed to the documentary crew and to Trygve, who watched anxiously through a Zoom call on my editor-in-chief’s cellphone.

The harsh, continuous rainfall tearing at our ramshackle fort was suddenly all that could be heard, as the sleeping bag was opened.

The reveal of Grandpa Bredo was momentous for all those present, and for different reasons. For Brad Wickham, he was looking at the very real dead man who he had been delivering dry ice to for a decade, with this potentially being his final visit up the hill.

For those volunteers who just carried and opened Grandpa’s casket, they were looking at the very myth, the local legend that has defined Nederland’s history for generations.

For me, I grew up in a relatively big family in a relatively small town and spent more than my fair share of time in the local funeral home. The sight of a dead body, especially one that remotely resembles the person passed, doesn’t necessarily rattle me. But I’ve rarely felt honored to meet a dead body.

And for Trygve, he was looking, through tears, upon his beloved grandfather.

And though Trygve was certainly affected by the emotional impact of the situation, he still needed to focus on the scientific aspect of observing the body.

The body of Grandpa Bredo looked peaceful, laying in his REI sleeping bag with his hands folded in front of him. His skin was normal, without any discoloration, and though his head had lost all its hair and teeth, the body looked as though it had well endured the cryogenic process so far.

“I am 90 percent sure it was my grandfather,” Trygve expressed in an email to The Mountain-Ear after the day’s events. “There was a body there. It had not rotted away. It was not black from freezing and thawing. It looked as good as my grandfather looked in 1990.”

“Its face was slightly thinner and the mouth looked slightly different from those pictures I have of my frozen grandpa from 1990. Could be because the dry cold climate has had a mummifying effect on him.”

But as Trygve repeatedly asked for different angles to view the body and for different specifics of the body’s condition, Brad counted down, warning that Grandpa Bredo’s body had almost been exposed for too long and needed to be encased and placed on ice again.

So they zipped up the sleeping bag, wrapped foam rubber around him and then shut him back into his metal container, secured new straps around the coffin, then carried him back to the Tuff Shed, into his wooden enclosure, right side up, where new bags of dry ice were placed on top of him and the enclosure was sealed back up.

The volunteer team could hardly contain the slew of emotions from what they had witnessed; all of them soaking wet and exhausted, yet exuberant from having witnessed, and been a part of, Nederland’s macabre history.

The documentary crew buzzed around the whole scene, capturing everything and interviewing those locals who had been impacted by Grandpa Bredo’s journey, a journey which may soon take him 42 miles up the road to Estes Park, to a cryogenic museum rumored to be built at The Stanley Hotel.

In fact, observing the conditions of the body was just one more factor necessary for making a deal with Estes Park.

As Grandpa Bredo’s journey continues on, so does Brad Wickham’s, as he will no longer have to fulfill what has been a decade long responsibility.

“I’m taking back my life,” Brad said in a Facebook post prior to that strange, stormy Tuesday. “My last commitment to rudimentary cryonics will be fulfilled August 1st. From there it’s anyone else’s problem.”

“It’s been interesting, sometimes a pleasure, and sometimes unbearable. Either way. After August 1st, I’m no longer the guy behind the ice.”

For my editor-in-chief, she was stunned, as not only had the whole event been somewhat gruesome, as she was asked to bring the phone closer to the body several times so that Trygve could view it over Zoom, but it was also the culmination of having lived nearby to, and reported on, the infamous dead man for several decades.

Driving back into Nederland, the both of us soaking wet from the storm, it was obvious that though she was somewhat harrowed, ultimately she was amazed by what we had witnessed.

I was amazed as well. I’ve spent the last year and a half telling every curious customer across the counter at Mountain Man the story of the frozen dead guy, and most of the time I’m met with disbelief. Not feigned disbelief as in a reaction to the audacity and ridiculousness of it all, but actual disbelief that Grandpa Bredo is still in a Tuff Shed up in Big Springs.

I hate to say it, but I eventually became skeptical too. Maybe the story was true, but the body couldn’t still be there, could it? The science couldn’t be as Mad as it sounded, right?

But it was.

Before witnessing the events of that Tuesday, I imagined we would be experiencing a viewing of the body within a Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory full of beakers of mysterious bubbling liquid and questionable devices that omit bolts of electricity arcing between metal prongs. But the truth of the scene was much more real, more human, and therefore madder than any sci-fi or horror movie could even try to portray.

All of us on that day, people of Nederland, members of the media, filmmakers, a husband and wife making a final delivery of dry ice, were present for a moment between a grandson and his grandfather, not in a scientific environment, not on a movie set, but within a concrete tomb of family treasures.

A festival is as substantial as a gust of wind, it blows through town and knocks a few things over; but the truth of the history, of the emotional impact of Grandpa Bredo’s legend, is as strong and beautiful as a lightning storm.