have you ever wondered
if you watched the snow long enough what
stories it might tell
there is someone who has done it his
name
is billy barr i spell it small b-i-l-l-y
small b-a-r-r some people
call him the snow guardian he lives in a
cabin
out in the woods picture this it’s a
snowy day it’s dark and cold
and you make a fire and you’re sitting
by the fire and you’re reading with a
cup of tea
and it goes on for nine months
billy lives alone in this house he
helped build
here he grows his garden has an
impressive hat collection
loves cricket and dreams of bollywood
every couple of weeks he skis back into
the nearest town for supplies
he’s been doing this for more than 40
winters
but billy does a little more than just
read
and drink tea for those 40 winters
billy has kept a meticulous record of
snow in his little part of the world
okay market said february 26
and 1978 half inches of snow that day
january 20th minus 11 and a half
april 28 1980 high was 41.
in 1997. one half inch knee snow
a weasel was roaming around inside the
shack
damn the birds were back
i lived in an eight by ten foot old
shack and had no electricity no water
and i had nothing and i was just there
all day
the main thing i interacted with
was the weather and the animals so i
started recording things just because it
was something to do
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i had nothing to prove no goals no
anything
so actually a researcher at the lab
wanted to look at it
and then once he started looking at it
scientifically
then all of a sudden like these decades
worth of data were being used for more
than my own curiosity
billy has done this every day twice a
day
all winter long
i’d keep going until the snow was gone
if it snowed i would record that no
matter when
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the trend i see is that we’re getting a
permanent snow pack later
and we get to bare ground sooner we’ll
have years where there was
a lot of snow on the ground and then
we lost no sooner than years it had a
lot less snow just because it’s a lot
warmer now
in a normal winter you’d expect to have
four to five record high temperatures
last year billy recorded 36.
not only is it a lot warmer we’re
getting a lot of dust blowing in
as soon as you get dust on the snow it
melts like that
you’re talking about the the snow pack
the water
supply for most of the southwest
i’m not real hopeful just because
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i don’t know how you reverse something
like that
as we leave colorado behind billy
imparts
one last bit of advice it’s like
anything else
you know i learned to ski to get around
i learned how to ski
better so i wouldn’t fall down all the
time
over a period of time i kind of learned
how to survive in this environment
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actually learning to fall is probably
the most important thing
you’re going to fall sick a lot easier
falling on your butt than on your face
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