Colo. man spends 50 years alone at 10K feet shaping climate research
GOTHIC, Colo. — As world leaders gathered across the globe this month to discuss a climate crisis that is rapidly heating the Earth, Billy Barr, 71, paused outside his mountainside cabin to measure snow.
His tools were simple, the same he’d used since the 1970s. A wooden ruler plunged into white flakes accumulating on his snow board — an old freezer door affixed to legs of plastic piping and wood — showed two inches.
A section of snow that he slid into a metal bucket and hung from a scale a few paces away told him it was about 10 percent water, which did not surprise him. For years, that number hovered around 6 percent, but snow here has gotten wetter.
“One year could easily be a fluke. I mean, weather is weather, it changes all the time. But all of a sudden, we’ve had five years in a row,” said Barr, dingy face mask dangling over his white beard. “So that’s starting to get significant.”
These measurements would be a few more data points in nearly five decades of records Barr has kept since leaving urban New Jersey to become the sole yearround resident of this abandoned silver mining town nearly 10,000 feet high in the Rockies. Back then, he wrote his observations — temperatures, snow, the sight of a gray jay or the tracks of a red fox — in small round script in steno notepads, to keep busy in a place he came to be alone.
“Cloudy all A.M.,” he wrote on Nov. 4, 1973. “7 ¾” snow. 5 ⅜” presently on ground by night.”
Along the way, Barr became an unwitting chronicler of climate change, the amiable keeper of an analog data set that would eventually inform researchers’ papers on hummingbird migration and marmot hibernation.
And he served as a winter pioneer in a mountaintop location whose snowpack, which feeds the Colorado River, is now the focus of urgent attention and scientific inquiry as the Western United States dries up.
It is no coincidence Barr logs his data up the hill from the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, a field station that comes alive each summer with researchers studying a rainbow of alpine wildflowers and animals, but which has long shut down when the snow comes.
Barr, a part-time accountant at the lab, always stayed put, stocking his freezer, stacking firewood, readying his notebooks and waxing skis that he would put up to 800 miles on per winter.
But as he enters his 50th winter in Gothic, change has come, and not just in shorter snow seasons and higher temperatures. All that skiing has left Barr’s legs in severe pain, and though he is planning hip replacements, he worries this might be his last winter here. And for the first time, Gothic is hosting winter researchers — a skeleton staff for a two-year, multi-million dollar project using radar, weather balloons, lasers and other high-tech equipment to better predict how rain and snow end up as water in the Colorado River Basin.
The company might have bothered Barr years ago, but he doesn’t relish the frozen solitude so much anymore. He is, though, determined to keep gathering his data. He says he feels an obligation — to the records themselves, and the precise way he has kept them since the early ‘70s.
“The thing is, nowadays, there’s mountain weather stations all over the place,” said Barr, who last winter logged just 200 miles on his skis. “But there aren’t any from then.”
Barr arrived in Gothic in 1972 as a Rutgers undergraduate helping on a water chemistry project. He stayed until the end of the year, then came permanently the following summer. In the mountains, he felt relaxed — even though home was an uninsulated mining shack with a kerosene lamp and a sleeping bag.
In the 1980s, he built himself a more comfortable cabin.
Barr did odd jobs at the lab: dishes, plumbing, helping in the library. He fought fires on a hotshot crew. Eventually, he became the lab’s accountant and business manager. He’d always liked numbers; as a kid, he counted gas stations on family trips.
That’s what inspired his records, not some grand scientific ambition. Over time, Barr found he liked comparing one year to others.
While Barr’s extended focus on winter in Gothic is unique, longterm research is one of the lab’s summer specialties. A marmot study has been running since 1962. David Inouye, a University of Maryland biologist, began his study of the timing and abundance of wildflower blooming in 1973. Yet although he knew Barr, it wasn’t until the 1990s that Inouye got wind of the accountant’s handwritten records.
“It turns out that what really sets the clock for all the phenology out there, in terms of flowering and animal activity, is when the snow melts. And Billy had this wonderful data set on not only when does it melt, but when does it start and how does it change from day to day,” Inouye said.