Four miles away from the closest cleared road high up in the Rockies in Colorado, a 73-year-old man with a long gray beard and two new hips walked through his yard to measure the new snow that fell during a day in mid-March.
After graduating from Rutgers University with a degree in environmental science, Billy Barr started recording snow and weather information over 50 years ago in Gothic, near a part of the headwaters of the Colorado River.
Feeling bored and wanting to stay occupied, he put together basic equipment and daily noted the inches of new snow, similar to how he kept track of gas station brands during family trips as a child.
Without pay but driven by intense curiosity and a preference for being on skis for more than half the year rather than walking, Barr continued to stay in the area and measure snowfall day after day, winter after winter.
His consistent measurements showed something he didn't expect long ago: the snow arrives later and disappears earlier as the planet warms. This is worrying for millions of people in the dry Southwest who depend on mountain snowpack to slowly melt through spring and summer and provide a steady supply of water for cities, farming, and ecosystems.
“Snow is like a reservoir of water, and if there's not enough of it, it's gone,” Barr explained.
People known as “citizen scientists” have been helping researchers by observing plants and counting wildlife to better understand the environment.
Barr is humble about his own contribution, although the handwritten snow data on his website has been used in numerous scientific papers and has aided in calibrating aerial snow measuring tools. And with each passing year, his data continues to expand.
“Anyone could do it,” said the modest man with a softened Jersey accent. “Being socially awkward allowed me to do it for 50 years, but anyone can sit and observe something like that.”
Two winters ago, Barr began experiencing frequent leg weakness while skiing through the spruce trees looking for animal tracks — another data point he records. He worried it might be his last year in Gothic, a former mining town now a research facility owned by the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, where he worked full time for decades and is now a part-time accountant.
“I was running out of time to live here,” he said. “That’s why I went through the hip replacements to prolong it.”
Two hip replacement surgeries allowed him to continue living at high altitude. Barr cross-country skied more in December compared to the previous winter.
“Unless something else goes wrong, which it will, but unless it’s severe, I think I can last out here a while longer,” he said.
Many things could go wrong. As Barr sat on a bench at the research lab on a warm March day, a heavy slab of snow slid off the roof and pushed the bench forward, nearly making him fall.
Not all risks are avoidable, but some are. If the ski track is too icy, he walks in the untracked snow for better footing. He grows produce in a greenhouse attached to his home, and most of his non-perishable goods, stocked the previous autumn, are organic. He wears a mask when he’s around others indoors.
"I can't catch a respiratory illness at this elevation," he said.
For Barr, longevity means having more time to enjoy the peaceful mountain lifestyle he likes from his simple two-room house heated by passive solar and a wood stove. He uses a composting toilet and depends on solar panels for heating water, doing laundry, and powering his nightly movie watching.
When he eventually retires from the mountains, Barr hopes to continue most of his long-standing weather collection remotely.
He has been experimenting with remote tools for five years, trying to adjust them to his old but dependable methods. He estimates it will take a few more years of testing before he will trust the new tools and, even then, is worried about equipment failure.
For now, he measures snow in his familiar and reliable way:
Around 4 p.m., he walks uphill from his home to a flat, square board painted white, and inserts a metal ruler into accumulated snow to measure its depth. Then he places a clear canister upside down into the snow, uses a sheet of metal to remove the rest of the snow, and then slides the sheet under the canister to help flip it over. He weighs the snow, subtracts the canister's weight, which allows him to calculate the water content.
So far, manual measuring remains the best method, scientists say. Automated snow measurements introduce a level of uncertainty, such as how wind spreads snow unevenly across the landscape, explained Ben Pritchett, senior forecaster at the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.
"Observing snow in person to understand how it's changing cannot be replaced," Pritchett said.
But Barr's data collection has always been unpaid volunteer work — and that complicates any succession plan when he eventually leaves his home in Gothic.
"If environmental science were funded like the way we fund cancer research or other efforts, we would absolutely continue that research and data collection," said Ian Billick, executive director for the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. "It would be extremely valuable."
The lab has winter caretakers who could ski the half mile (.8 kilometer) to Barr's home to manually measure new snow at the same site using his same method, but someone would still need to cover the cost of their time.
Barr is well aware that his modest weather station represents just a snapshot of the Colorado River basin, and that satellites, lasers, and computer models can now calculate how much snow falls basin-wide and predict resulting runoff. Yet local scientists say some of those models wouldn't be as accurate without his work.
Ian Breckheimer, an ecologist with the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, measures snow from space using satellites. Given the distance, Breckheimer needed on-the-ground data to calibrate his model.
"Billy's data provides that ground truth," Breckheimer said. "We know that his data is accurate. So that means that we can compare all the things that we think we can see to the things that we know are accurate."
Between measuring the snow and noting animal sightings, Barr created a body of work that no one asked him to compile and that hasn't brought him a dime.
Although it's helped inspire scientists who work with the nearby mountainside lab, Barr said he started measuring snowfall out of a simple desire to relate to the world around him. He felt out of place in the city and stifled by social expectations.
He said that he didn't fit in anywhere and that doesn't make him a troublemaker. You have to search for what will work for you. Sometimes that means trying different things and going different places.
Barr hopes that the modern high-tech water forecasting tools scientists have today will result in unusual solutions for managing the decreasing resource, just like he created a lifestyle that goes against societal norms.
It might lead to changes such as not having green lawns in the middle of Arizona anymore, as that's not a good use of the limited water resource. Barr thinks that water is more valuable than gold.
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The Walton Family Foundation supports the Associated Press for water and environmental policy coverage. The AP is entirely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
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