Forrest Whitman, Peak to Peak. The first weekend in March is the biggest mountain festival of them all, Frozen Dead Guy Days! What makes this party happen? Is it just time to take our mind off the wind or is it the weird allure of an old dead guy frozen in a shed? Something brings over 7,000 tourists to Nederland for Frozen Dead Guy Days. Even if they don’t know it, they’re replaying a ritual of the 19th & early 20th century mountain vitalists.

The 19th Century Winter Mountain Campout

If you’d been in these parts between about 1870 and 1920 a good many tourists would be found here living in wagons in the woods, digging snow caves, looking for places that took in roomers and so on. Their main inspiration was the philosophy of “vitalism.”

They would be talking about the works of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Lydia Pinkham or Horatio Dresser. Those mountain tourists of a hundred years ago were seeking fun and better health and going to festivals not that different from Frozen Dead Guy Days, though very tiny in comparison.

The invigorating mountain air was supplemented by draughts of radium water and a healthy daily exercise regimen to put them in touch with a vital flow of energy. This approach to health was something of a nation-wide cult called vitalism. Today’s seekers will be having draughts of beer, not radium water, but they will still be dunking themselves in frozen water.

Vitalists And the Frozen Dead Guy

Vitalism was based on some very old notions of health going back to the middle ages in Europe where the “regimen sanitatis salernitanum” outlined the basic vitalist principles. Since Trygve Bouge was a fan, this philosophy may be a clue as to why Trygve and his mother, Aud, brought Trygve’s dead grandfather here from Norway and started the whole frozen dead guy mystique.

Trygve Bouge Taken Somewhat Seriously

I didn’t take Trygve very seriously, yet he was always able to do some impromptu lectures while he built his never-finished house and made many friends. I did a few times listen to Trygve hold forth on the “life force” and the need for a regular dunking in ice water. In fact, he was effective as an organizer of polar plunges, snow immersion, and many other practices. Some of his health regime ideas are lurking behind the festivities at Frozen Dead Guy Days.

Getting Into The Life Force In The Nude

Trygve urged us all to get out in the elements and become one with the vital force. He advised all of us to run, ski or swim, no matter what the weather and preferably naked. Some Boulderites do that naked running and swimming thing (even bicycle riding) still today.

That leads to the endless vexation of the Boulder City Council. The debate over public nudity gave rise to some great moments in Boulder City Council history back in the 1970s. Who can forget the recitation by a noted local columnist of “The Old Swimmin’ Hole,” by James Whitcomb Riley, at a council meeting?

It was Trygve who popularized the various polar plunges around the state and invented some of them. It was his lectures in bars in Boulder and in Nederland that got the whole idea of the New Year’s plunge in Boulder Reservoir started.

Vital Force, Ice Plunges and Sex

Vitalism led Trygve to do some astounding things. He still holds the world’s record for submersion in ice water. He stayed in ice water for one hour and four minutes in February of 1994. His feat was predicted by a famous vitalist writer, Karl von Reichenbach, in the 19th century.

The sexual urge itself was another example of this vital force animating the human. Indeed, Trygve often seemed to give off a good deal of such life force. I noted how many a young woman would sit at his feet as he expounded the vital force philosophy. He certainly did command attention in a kind of wild Nordic way.

Does Vitalism Explain the Frozen Dead Guy?

In many ways, the believers in contemporary cryonic science follow in the path of the vitalists. By freezing a human body, they assume some of the “odic force” in that person will be captured. When the family of grandfather Bredo froze his body cryonically from 1990 till 1993 and then moved it to Nederland, they apparently followed this philosophy. Cryonics argues that just because a body has been declared medically dead, or even clinically dead, does not necessarily mean it’s dead from an “information-theoretic” point of view. In a way, the frozen body is engaged in a kind of ultimate couch surfing, or so believers in cryonic science think.

Vitalism And A Great Nederland Party

It’s too bad Trygve was deported back to Norway. I wish I’d bought him a drink at the P.I. and quizzed him more often. Vitalists or not, Nederland celebrates.

(Originally published in the March 14, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)