Winter Finally Comes for Gothic’s Billy Barr

Billy Barr has spent 54 winters living off grid near Gothic, Colorado, where he has built one of the longest and most detailed climate records in the Rocky Mountains by meticulously hand-measuring snowfall, temperature, and wildlife each day. Now in his seventies and recovering from two hip surgeries, his ability to continue living alone in the high country is uncertain. What remains unquestioned is the value of his work, which has become indispensable to scientists studying climate change—a rare, human-scale record of a changing mountain ecosystem.

Climate change, in a mordant twist, is also making Barr’s daily existence even harder. For years, he has relied on a natural spring as his primary water source. But with less snow, and thus less insulation, his water line has frozen a couple of times in winter. Barr then has to ski to the RMBL campus for clean water, hauling four one-liter jugs on his back. Snow also is getting wetter and heavier, making it hard for him to break trails or dig out his cabin. “He doesn’t want people to do stuff for him,” says Bobbi Peckarsky, a Cornell University emeritus professor who met Barr at the research center in the 1970s and remains among his closest friends. “He wants to be able to do it for himself.”