One Man's Climate Record: Billy Barr logs 52 years of snow by hand in Colorado

Representative Image of a man recording snowfall measurements in Colorado by hand (AI-generated image) In a remote patch of Colorado's Gunnison National Forest, four miles from the nearest ploughed road, a man known simply as Billy Barr has spent 52 consecutive winters recording daily snowfall, temperature and weather observations from his off-grid cabin at roughly 9,600 feet. Barr first began jotting down snow measurements in 1974, shortly after graduating from Rutgers University with a degree in environmental science, initially just to keep himself occupied through the long, isolated winters near Gothic, a former silver mining town now home to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Decades later, that same handwritten record has become one of the most detailed and continuous climate datasets in the American West, used by researchers to calibrate satellite-based snow measurements and understand groundwater flows feeding the Colorado River Basin, a water source relied on by more than 40 million people.How Barr's daily habit turned into a scientific resourceAccording to a profile in 5280 Magazine, barr has lived full time in Gothic since the early 1970s, occupying a 2,000 square ...