There he was. I couldn’t actually see his body. He was encased head-down and feet-up in a shiny futuristic capsule. It was the opposite of a proper burial—vertical, exposed, and on display at the so-called International Cryonics Museum in Estes Park, Colorado. I paid twenty bucks to see the dead guy as part of a tour.

The international museum is a one-room cabin—the former ice house at the historic Stanley Hotel. If you know about the Stanley Hotel, you’ll immediately recognize the irony of there being a frozen guy in their former ice house. If you don’t know, I’ll fill you in here: The Stanley Hotel is the setting for Stephen King’s book and movie The Shining, based on a haunted hotel that drives a writer (played brilliantly by Jack Nicholson) psychotic. In the final scene, our writer is frozen solid in a Colorado blizzard right outside the hotel—a frozen dead guy.

Exactly how the real frozen dead guy ended up on display in the one-room International Cryonics Museum at the reportedly haunted Stanley Hotel in Estes Park is a story too bizarre to possibly be true, except for the fact that it is, indeed, completely true. But, even stranger, and perhaps a bit unnerving, is my recent discovery of my own coincidental connection to the famous Frozen Dead Guy.

Bredo Morstøl was a typical Norwegian man. He loved the fjords and mountains of his beautiful homeland. His family owned some mountain property just up valley from the head of one of those fjords somewhere along the central Norwegian coast, a long way from Oslo and well north of Bergen.

The story goes that, at the age of ninety, sometime in the year 1989, Bredo, still active and vibrant, had returned to the cabin after some mountain sauntering. Over evening conversation with family, they got to talking about the idea of getting oneself frozen after death for future revival.

Not long after that family discussion, Bredo Morstøl croaked right there in the Norwegian countryside. Without Bredo’s living consent, his grandson Trygve Bauge, a life extension fanatic like an early Wim Hof, quickly got to work putting his dead grandfather on ice—a now-or-never opportunity, one supposes.

Somehow Trygve managed to get his freshly frozen dead grandfather packed up as cargo and shipped to California, where he was temporarily entombed in a liquid nitrogen chamber provided by the cryonics company Trans Time, where he stayed for four years. But this was an interim station for Grandpa. Trygve had plans to start his own homegrown cryonics company—a DIY affair in the hills above the small town of Nederland, Colorado, where his mother, and Bredo Morstøl’s daughter, Aud Morstøl, owned a small property.

The first of many problems with that plan is that Trygve and his mother didn’t tell the town about it and did not apply for any business licensing or zoning permits for such a venture. Grandpa and his cryonic tomb were simply packed in dry ice and locked away in a common Tuff Shed—the type most people use for their garden tools.

The second problem is that the home on the property itself was only partially constructed and was in violation of local zoning and building regulations even as a standard residence.

The first hammer fell on Trygve’s audacious plan when he was deported back to Norway for overstaying his visa. The second hammer dropped when Aud was entered into an eviction process for those zoning and permitting violations. In a panic, Aud spilled the beans about her frozen father, worried about who would top up the dry ice to prevent the body from thawing.

This caused an uproar with the Nederland city council, catching the small community completely off-guard. Of course, there were no specific laws on the books in Nederland (or Boulder County, Colorado) addressing the possibility of residents cryonically preserving dead relatives in their backyards. So, the first thing the town did was pass a law prohibiting such activity—a modern-day example of peculiar reactionary lawmaking that leads to bathroom reader material about hilarious legal oddities. For example, just up the road from Nederland in the even stranger hippie commune of Ward, it is said that it’s illegal to own a billiard hall, but only if your name is Steve. I wonder what the heck “Steve” did to deserve that?

The legal issue wasn’t going to resolve the fact that the town now had a frozen dead guy on their hands, so they did the most sensible thing: They grandfathered the grandfather. Frozen Bredo could stay put in his Tuff Shed so long as the family could find a caretaker to keep him on ice.

Locals stepped up to the plate, coordinating with a now-exiled Trygve in Norway for payment. They made runs down to Denver to pick up hundreds of pounds of dry ice at a time and transport it up to Bredo’s shed, at times loading the ice onto sleds during winter blizzards for the final stretch to the Tuff shed—as reliable as the U.S. Postal Service.

As word spread through the town about the frozen dead guy up the hill, curiosity took hold, and people started to realize the opportunity. In 2002, the first annual Frozen Dead Guy Days was held in the small town of Nederland. People came from all around for the coffin races, frozen turkey bowling, and polar plunges in Barker Reservoir. VIP fair-goers could even hitch a ride up to see Bredo’s frozen tomb in the shed and drink a customary toast with the dead guy.

The festival was a hit and, over the years, grew more popular. A major radio station even donated a new, nicer Tuff Shed for Grandpa, as Bredo became known to the town. Murals of a frozen old guy started appearing on storefront walls.

After twenty years of revelry, Frozen Dead Guy Days outgrew the capacity of little Nederland to handle the crowds. That’s when the big money from Estes Park and the Stanley Hotel kicked in, just a little way up the road. Estes Park was built as a tourist town, and the Stanley Hotel’s history was made for this.

But a Tuff Shed wasn’t going to cut it. They partnered with Alcor, a cryonics company based, ironically, in sizzling Scottsdale, Arizona. They converted the hotel’s old ice house into the new International Museum of Cryonics with Grandpa himself as the main attraction—his frozen tomb, called a dewar, displayed inside a protective glass cube like the Mona Lisa.

The tour was fascinating, if a bit morbid. A young man in the back had to excuse himself when the tour guide explained that most dewars can hold four bodies and nine heads. Heads? That’s right, a typical dewar contains four vertical bodies, stored head-down, and a sort of spinning colander-type contraption with dividers contains up to nine human heads above the feet of the whole bodies.

“Why would one freeze just their head?” I asked.

“The reasoning for most people,” said the tour guide, “is that it’s much cheaper at $80,000 compared to $240,000 for your whole body.” The rationale is also that, when the medical tech is ready to revive people, you will really only need your head as it will either be sewn onto a donor body, or more likely, a humanoid robot body.

Unlike the queasy young man who politely excused himself on the verge of dry-heaving, I was positively fascinated by the whole thing. I’m pretty sure I would never put cryonic preservation on my Christmas list. But, the science of human longevity fascinates me.

That’s why I was taken aback a little when the tour guide said that, if Alcor wanted to, they could revive cryonically preserved humans today. Wait... What? Frozen people who died years ago could be revived today and literally come back to life?

This, apparently, has already been demonstrated with other life forms. And, not only can a clinically dead cryonically preserved life be resurrected, that life can have memory of its past life. Way back in the 1950s, scientists Dr. Audrey Smith and James Lovelock trained some hamsters to solve a maze, then froze them in super-cooled water. Upon reanimation in, basically, an early microwave oven, the hamsters not only revived, but they solved their maze, demonstrating that memory is preserved in the structure of the brain even after freezing it. Additional similar studies were done with different types of worms and mice in the ensuing decades, each one showing that a previously frozen reanimated brain picked up where it left off as if waking from a deep sleep.

So, why aren’t cryonically frozen humans being reanimated yet? The reason is because there’s a more difficult challenge to solve. Unlike the science experiments where perfectly healthy life forms were deliberately frozen, cryonically preserved humans died of a cause like heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or cancer. Resurrecting them now would only return them to their disease-ridden states just before they died. They wouldn’t last long.

Before reanimating people, we must not only have immediate cures for the diseases they succumbed to, but likely also age reversal capabilities. After all, any smart person choosing to be cryonically preserved would never want to be resurrected as a ninety-year-old on their deathbed only to go through the dying process again. No, they would want to be resurrected as they were in their younger form. That’s going to take some time.

Seeing Bredo trapped in that contraption made me wonder about the home he left behind in Norway. He was from a small village called Isfjorden. The name sounded really familiar. Initially, I mistakenly thought it was the fjord-side town that inspired the animated setting for the movie Frozen. But, when I looked it up on the map, I almost cryonically froze myself in my chair. Isfjorden was one of a handful of Norwegian villages my family and I stayed in during a 2023 Nordic European vacation.

Well, we didn’t actually stay in the village, but in a remote cabin a few kilometers up valley from the village. It was a stunningly beautiful place—almost mystical. We had to park the car and walk the final kilometer to the cabin where we were greeted by three majestic horses. Ancient low stone walls outlined plots of land harboring little red country houses. A flower-and-rock-bordered brook gurgled through the middle.

I zoomed in on the map, and to my astonishment, there was the name Morstøl in at least two different places right there in that valley. A little more research and I discovered that, indeed, Grandpa Bredo Morstøl’s family owned land in that valley—a family ski and hiking retreat in the beautiful Norwegian landscape. It’s even possible that the very cabin we stayed in may have been owned—may still be owned—by the Morstøl family, since my research indicates that the land in the entire valley was originally owned only by three families, the Morstøls being one.

Is it possible that we stayed in the same exact cabin where Bredo Morstøl casually expressed his curiosity about cryonic preservation just days or weeks before his peaceful death? The answer to that question may come in a follow-up piece. For now, I’m left pondering the strangeness of life in every way. The strangeness of a person making a decision about whether to freeze their whole body or just their head. The strangeness of Trygve Bauge’s delusional plans to create a secret cryonics facility in a smalltown Colorado backyard using his own dead grandfather as the first subject. The strangeness of a whole festival being created around that frozen dead guy, and the strange irony of the frozen dead guy being moved to the Stanley Hotel, a place known as the setting for a movie that closes with a scene of a frozen dead guy. And then, the personal strangeness of discovering my own highly unlikely potential connection to Grandpa Bredo Morstøl myself.

Life is beautifully strange.

My daughter and I are standing inside a subterranean room five miles from the car, which is parked at the end of a very long dirt road. It’s not technically a cave, but it feels like one. A monstrous rock the size of a house is overhead, perched on other rocks the size of buses and trucks in just such a way as to form this secret chamber we find ourselves in.

I only spotted the cave because I happened to glance to the side of the trail and noticed a waist-high opening in the rocks to my left. Inside the cavern we find ourselves exploring a living room with a flat dirt floor, large rock-lined fire pit, and natural stone benches and tables. There are no signs or markers—no place name to affix to this cave and no marking on the map indicating its location. That’s because there are likely hundreds of hideaways like this in the area—a land of colossal boulders, stone passageways, monolithic towers, and serene rock gardens.

This is Colorado’s Lost Creek Wilderness. People wanted to flood this place back in the 1890s. Had they succeeded, these hidden worlds would have been lost to society—submerged like Glen Canyon. Fortunately, the effort failed, and more than a half-century after the dam builders gave up, the Lost Creek Wilderness was protected in 1980, not for reservoir building, but for its extraordinary intrinsic value as one of Colorado’s most unique natural landscapes.

Today, the Lost Creek Wilderness covers almost 115,000 acres just to the southwest of Denver. It is certainly not what many people envision when they think of the Colorado Rockies. While the Lost Creek Wilderness is certainly rugged, it lacks the sweeping high alpine expanses typical of Colorado wilderness, and harbors no lakes. Instead, it offers a mysterious, more intimate, backcountry experience where poking around reveals all manner of giant stone formations—monster domes, towers, ramps, and places where the broken slabs and boulders have fallen and weathered in such ways as to form hidden passages, caves, roofs, and grottos.

Note to readers: If you would like to see a video of our hike and these sites, check out my YouTube.

It wasn’t for a lack of effort that the dam project failed spectacularly. Engineers with the so-called Lost Park Reservoir Project devised what could only be described today as a harebrained, but ambitious scheme to create a massive reservoir through some very unconventional means and with little to no regard for the natural wonder they would be obliterating in the process if successful.

Disappearing streams and rivers are not particularly uncommon in certain parts of the world, especially in areas of limestone karst geology. Colorado is not, however, known for this particular type of geology. So, the idea of a disappearing stream in Colorado is very much a novelty, and it’s still surprising that the Lost Creek doesn’t generate more attention.

Perhaps that’s because it’s not easy to find. The Lost Creek doesn’t flow through limestone karst, but it vanishes underground nevertheless—at least nine times—before finally emerging as Goose Creek. The Lost Creek Wilderness area is a massive igneous batholith that has been fractured and weathered through the eons to create a labyrinth of fascinating rock-bound nooks and crannies. Through this land of broken boulders, water flows at times under massive dogpiles of ancient boulders ranging in size from Volkswagens to stadium domes and bigger.

The enterprising water engineers in the 1890s, observing that Lost Creek flowed deep underneath these colossuses, actually believed that they could use these massive boulders to do most of the work for them—that all they had to do was plug the gaps between them and the water would have nowhere to go but to flood the beautiful valley upstream.

After cutting roads, building worker housing, and hauling big machinery into the wilderness by mule-power, they got to work. Their efforts were relentless, but it was a complete failure. The subterranean Lost Creek doesn’t run through a single passageway, but instead through a honeycomb matrix of piled boulders and solid rock slabs. With each passage the engineers plugged, the water simply found another opening.

After many years of hard effort, the ill-fated venture was finally abandoned, but some of the cabins built for the workers and the steam hoist assembled at the “shafthouse” site were left behind. These relics are now historical artifacts. The steam hoist in particular is a fascinating piece of machinery—a steel ghost of the Gilded Age, abandoned to its hidden perch deep in the wilderness. When standing next to it, it’s remarkable to consider the effort required to even get that type of machinery to that location in the first place in the 1890s. It’s also fascinating to realize that, over a century ago, those workers probably camped in the cave we discovered since it was just a short walk from the shafthouse.

The steam hoist was placed where it was because Lost Creek flowed silently directly underneath it. Venturing beyond the steam hoist, we look for the place the creek enters the earth but are blocked by a twelve-foot drop, and although someone long ago (perhaps the engineers) placed a log with crude steps cut from it as a makeshift ladder, we decide it’s too dangerous in this location and make this our turn-around point.

But, we are still determined to find the Lost Creek. Perhaps we can find the place where it emerges downstream. In our search we walk down an enormous rock ramp, reminding me of the slickrock of Utah. This leads to more rock pile caverns and passages and we can now hear, but not see, the Lost Creek. It is near. We listen closely and realize that the sound of the stream is coming from a very specific location just down valley.

We make our way to the sound, passing under the lower jaw of a stone sperm whale head, and carefully find passageways down and through spaces between boulders and through the brush. The sound gets louder, but the water is still unseen until finally I catch a glimpse of movement below—clear water gliding over a sandy bottom.

We negotiate some rock ledges and finally arrive at a most remarkable little Eden. Brook trout swim lazily around in the clear, cold water, just emerging from a narrow tunnel in the rock into a pool before widening into a glistening riffle. Downstream a bit lies a stone monument the size and approximate shape of an upturned city bus—the stream abuts its face and gravity helps the water flow around the base.

I believe, though I’m not sure, that this location is Lost Creek’s last emergence from the earth, and therefore, we are technically at the bank of Goose Creek as the name changes once it emerges for the last time. Lost Creek is said to drop under ground and reemerge in at least nine other locations, one of which I know well. It’s a place several miles farther upstream where a short off-trail exploration, if planned right, will take you to the exit of a large tunnel where the stream outflow is. In that place, the outflow is large enough to walk into and you can walk through the short tunnel like Indiana Jones exploring a subterranean river.

Locals keep the precise location of these hidden treasures close to the vest, and I intend to honor that tradition here. These places are not easy to locate and often even harder to get to. They are well off-trail, unmarked, and largely undisturbed.

And it should remain that way. A major part of the human appeal of wilderness is the sense of potential discovery, of the idea that, within our wilderness, there are still caves to stumble upon and disappearing rivers to find, and that when we do find them, there will be no interpretive signs and no safety railings.

On our return hike we follow a tiny tributary stream past a series of extraordinary campsites, some of which are sheltered by rock slab ceilings and stone alcoves where a person can set up a camp well out of the elements like a caveman. Inside one of them we find a little plastic box containing photos and a memorial notebook of a man who died way too young nine years ago, but lived a life of adventure exploring the Lost Creek Wilderness. In the notebook, a simple message: “We were having fun.”

Yes, you were. Rest in Peace, John.

For a moment I envied the people on the sailboat, silhouetted against the midnight sun. But I quickly realized how silly the thought was. I was standing in what was probably—no, undoubtedly—the most beautiful place I’d ever been, my feet planted in warm Arctic sand, the surf rolling in between two Rocks of Gibraltar.

Norway’s Lofoten Islands are, at times, hard to comprehend. The place is astoundingly beautiful and dramatic. Certain views of its white sand beaches and turquoise waters can easily double for the Caribbean, until you look up and see the towers of rock or feel the iciness of that water. It’s an archipelago risen nearly vertical from the deep blue of the North Atlantic, jutting far to the west of Norway’s eastward-curving Arctic mainland like a giant Viking’s finger pointing to westward voyages of the distant past.

The Lofoten Islands are a clichéd fairy-tale land in a country often described as a fairy tale, with its impossible fjord-side villages and waterfalls around every bend in the road.

This beach between the two Gibraltars can only be reached by foot. The trail started right off the doorstep of an old one-room schoolhouse turned vacation rental. The home faced east over a protected bay with placid waters surrounded by quintessential Norwegian peaks—pointy and green.

The trail led inland from the bay, soon skirting the shore of a freshwater lake graced with a forest of stunted Arctic trees, then up a rocky slope and past a stone shelter to another lake, this one bordered not by trees, but by stark gray and white boulders.

We were crossing at a narrow point in the island over a low saddle between enormous, steep ramps of solid, glacier-polished rock. Our destination was the other shore, opposite the protected waters by the schoolhouse. This other shore was the true coast—land’s end. From there to the west, the next rock would be on Greenland, far, far beyond the horizon.

The shoreline of the second lake was rugged, so we slowly picked our way over and around the gray and white boulders. The rock seemed as hard as diamond, and often equally as smooth along the unbroken surfaces, but sharp along the fracture points. Above the broken rock and upper lake, the trail reappeared through a grassy slope to the final rise of the saddle.

A young Brit stood motionless on that apex next to an expensive camera. We approached quietly with a quick hello just as the view unfolded before us. Then I caught my breath—not from fatigue, but from shock. Shock at the sight before me. My daughter stopped cold as well and managed to let out a whispered, “Whoa...” then stood still as a statue.

Nearing midnight, we peered down the slope at a big sun just grazing a vast ocean horizon behind an expanse of almost-white sand below the verdant hillside. The sandy beach—a half-mile long—was bracketed on both ends by near-vertical walls of that gray and white stone: Gibraltars, both of them. A single sailboat drifted in front of that low and deep-yellow midnight sun.

Shaking off the shock of this most beautiful of sights, we simply gave the Brit a knowing nod as he continued to stare reverently at the scene before seeming to remember his camera at his side.

As rugged as the approach was, the descent was gentle, down through green grass and white wildflowers until finally, at the bottom, the green grass was overtaken by the beach sand.

The Arctic surf boomed in our ears now, and the white foam and mist advanced and retreated on the other side of a hundred meters of sand. With shoes now removed, we ran across that beach and felt the exhilarating cold of surf two hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. That big, rich sun was not setting; it was drifting parallel to the horizon, just teasing a connection to the ocean before beginning its gradual rise again. We could have spent all night there, and one day I will return to this most beautiful of places to do just that.

As we turned to begin the three-mile return hike back over the spine of the island, a marine layer began to roll in, gracing the Gibraltars with skirts of white clouds. And, as we descended along the lakes back to the schoolhouse, a gigantic cloud wave poured beautiful and white over the saddle, drifting past and through us—like the surf of Vestervika Beach taking celestial form and forever enveloping my heart and soul.

Forever I will remember this most beautiful place in the world, Vestervika Beach.

To experience the scale of the cliffs and the sound of the surf at Vestervika, turn on your audio and watch this brief two-minute cinematic look at the trail: