Colorado Mountain Man Logs Weather for Half a Century
GOTHIC, Colo.—The sky was a crisp blue high up in the West Elk Mountains of Colorado, and the plows had cleared the road to Gothic of fresh snow.
The day began with a bone-numbing minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit on Nov. 20—but billy barr was aware of that. He meticulously recorded the temperature and other crucial weather indicators on his computer, as he has been doing for years.
In the beginning, keeping track of the weather was a way to pass the time and learn about nature’s ways and patterns.
“It was something to do,” said barr, 74, who prefers to spell his name with lowercase letters out of a sense of humility.
“When did the first birds and the first animals arrive” in the spring? “It was like, ‘Oh, the first robin is here.’ I’d write it down. Year after year.”
Half a century later, barr celebrated his 53rd winter living like a real mountain man—a term he finds perplexing.
“I live in the mountains. I am a male. But I don’t know what the people mean by mountain man—and that’s the problem,” barr says with a grin.
He cuts wood, goes cross-country skiing, but he also knits and bakes.
“It just doesn’t make sense” to some people, he said.
In 1972, the New Jersey native decided he’d had enough of cities and crowds and living like everyone else.
He was just 21 years old and wanted to find peace away from the stresses of modern society. At the same time, he hoped to get married and have a family, but things didn’t turn out that way.
He realized he didn’t have the temperament to meet people and socialize.
“I really was not doing well where I was,” said barr, who lives in a wood frame cabin he built near the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab on the way to Gothic Mountain.
“It was just so bad that I wanted to get away from problems, and so it was not that difficult to come out here.”
“I just wanted a break from all the social stuff. I just wanted to be left alone in peace. I wanted to live my own life. I didn’t want to be judged by other people. And so I got out here and got to live my own life.
“It’s funny because I’ve done different kinds of jobs. I fought forest fires for five summers. I’ve done plumbing.”
When you live in a big city, there are many people around you and it’s hard for a “passive person” to fit in, barr says.
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He keeps an eye on the daily temperature, wind, and snowfall from his weather station outside the cabin.
He first started keeping a weather log using standard notepads because he had a lot of free time between chores.
“So I started writing down things, which is mostly what was around me—which was the weather and the animals.”
Each daily entry would include the average high and low temperature, the amount of rain and snow on the ground, and water content in the snowpack.
He would then make a monthly average and report with all the information.
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