Snowboarder from Barrington dies in Minnesota

Derek Harms, a 20-year-old college student from Barrington, died Sunday while snowboarding on a hill at Duluth's Spirit Mountain in Minnesota.

Harms was remembered as a kind person with an endless spirit and energy to spend time with the people he cared about, which was practically everybody.

Amy Broadbridge, a director at Camp Deerhorn in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where Harms spent nine summers first as a camper and later as a counselor, said Harms was loved and respected by campers and staff alike.

Grant Papastefan, a 21-year-old Lake Forest man, was Harms' close friend at Camp Deerhorn and said it "was always like a family at camp."

"And he was truly right at the center of that family," Papastefan said.

Papastefan said Harms would spend all day with campers, then spend the evenings sitting around the campfire playing guitar while Papastefan - a voice student at Northwestern University - sang and still would have the energy to spend time with his friends afterward.

"We like to say that his heart was as big as his hair," Broadbridge said Tuesday night. And his hair was quite big. Once he filmed himself sticking 288 unsharpened pencils in his curls and uploaded the video to YouTube.

According to Minnesota authorities, Harms and some of his friends were snowboarding on one of Spirit Mountain's most challenging hills early Sunday afternoon. When Harms did not make it to the bottom, his friends went to look for him and found him on the ground. He was later pronounced dead from multiple blunt force injuries.

Harms attended Barrington High School and went to college at Winona State University in Minnesota.

Funeral services will be held Sunday at St. Michael's Episcopal Church, 647 Dundee Ave. in Barrington. The visitation will begin at 2 p.m., and the service will begin at 4 p.m. There will be a reception afterward.

•The Associated Press contributed to this report