Solitary Mountain Man's Hobby Produces Cache Of Climate Data
GOTHIC, Colo. (CBS4/CBS News) - Billy Barr wanted to get away.
And, boy, did he.
To Gothic, Colorado, north of Crested Butte.
"So I came out late May, summer of '72," Barr said. "It was such a mental relief just to have peace and quiet in my life."
Home, then, was an 8-by-10 foot shack.
"The wind would literally blow snow through the cracks," Barr told CBS News correspondent John Blackstone.
"You came for the solitude, but you started to get a little bored?" Blackstone asked.
"A bit of boredom, but a lot of it was just… making my own activity," Barr said.
Gothic's primary activity - silver ore mining - began in the 1880's. That lasted little more than 40 years, and the town was abandoned. Its collection of old buildings now carries the haunting moniker of 'ghost town.'
In his boredom, Barr found a calling. Measuring snow. Since 1974, he's taken measurements twice a day, but it wasn't just the snow depth and when it melted. Using a hand-operated system he built himself, he also calculated how much groundwater that snow would produce when it melted.
When that wasn't enough to keep Barr busy, he started tracking wildlife and recorded it all by hand in a series of now-tattered notebooks.
Now those notes are the town's latest treasure.
In the early '90s, scientist David Inouye from the neighboring Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory needed data for his research on wildflowers. He had heard about Barr's notebooks, but was shocked when he saw how comprehensive they were.
"I said, 'Billy! You know those data are really relevant to how the climate is changing, and how animals are responding to the changing climate," Inouye said.
Barr said he had no idea his measurements would have any kind of long-term significance.
"Remember this was mid-'70s, early-mid-'70s," Barr said. "If you asked me about climate change, I would've said, yeah, it got warm, I took my sweater off. I mean, it meant nothing to me!"
But now it means everything to the global scientific community, which has published his numbers in dozens of scientific papers.
"One of these days, I'll read 'em! Yeah," Barr said. "I wasn't out to prove anything. I just recorded the numbers."