Colorado’s accidental climatologist taps 52 years of daily winter weather reports to confirm a troubling trend

GOTHIC — billy barr rifles through the spiral-bound notebooks stacked beneath his desktop computer and pulls out his journal from 1976-77. 

The dog-eared pages toss up dust that dances in the sunlight streaming through his cabin window.

“OK, here is the total snowfall to date for today in 1977,” he says, his finger tracing notes from Feb. 11. “Total amount of snow, let’s see, was 196. That’s centimeters.”

He punches a calculator.  

That’s 77 inches. Today, we are at 100 inches. On this day in 1977, barr recorded 13 inches of snow on the ground near his off-grid home on a forested hill above the mining town turned alpine research haven. 

“You see how pathetic that winter was? Right now we have 36 inches and that’s bad,” says barr, who has taken meticulous notes and measurements outside his remote winter cabin every winter day for 52 years, building a database that reveals more than he ever could have expected. 

“So really there’s no other winter that comes close to 1976-77,” he says, reaching for another notebook and thumbing through pages that have not been turned in many years. “Look, even for 1980-81, which was a really dry winter, we had more snow to date.”

Through January 1981 — commonly considered the second-worst winter in Colorado until this winter of naught — barr counted 298 centimeters of snow. Through January 2026, he counted 210 centimeters. So 2025-26 is tracking to take the mantle of the second lousiest winter ever.

barr’s daily notes have turned out to be the harbinger of a climate in flux. He’s not comfortable with his heralded status as a climate prophet. But at age 74, he still wakes early every winter morning to record his weather and wildlife observations and measurements. 

“All I do for the most part is record data. So when someone says, what does this mean? I say I’m not a meteorologist. I’m not a hydrologist. I record data and I watch trends,” says barr, who writes his name in lowercase letters “just because I’m not that important.”

“I just write down what I see,” he says. “Now I have my own personal opinions. And I have data to back it up. But the data doesn’t back it up. The data gives me those opinions.”

Ski resorts are limping through the worst snow season in memory. More than 40 million Westerners relying on the Colorado River are bracing for a hot, dry summer with the federal government forecasting a third of normal flows for the desert-flanked basin. Wildfire teams are girding for battle. The implications of this winter without winter will be far-reaching. And barr’s notebooks deliver a bit of context for what this season of naught will bring.

So many records this winter

Here’s a big trend barr has tracked: In the first 40 years he scribbled his stats from one of the snowiest valleys in the state, he counted two winters that were back-to-back drier and warmer than the rest. 

“This will be the 14th winter in the last 15 winters with below-average snowfall,” he says. “Suddenly, those two winters, which at the time seemed like an unusual thing, are the new normal.” 

The average snowfall for the first two decades of his measurements was 456 inches every winter. This winter will likely be well below 400 for the first time, marking yet another record, he says. 

On the snow-packed trail up to Gothic along the Upper East River, a man was jogging in a T-shirt in the middle of February. In the abandoned silver mining town turned scientific research station, a couple teenagers who trudged up the road were throwing a disc in shorts and snow boots. 

Over his half-century of counting and measuring around 210 days of winter annually, he’s tracked about four weather records every season. For many years, those records involved some of the biggest snowfalls or coldest temperatures.  

This year he’s recorded dozens of records. And none of them are the good kind. 

First and foremost is the snow-melting deluge of record-high temperatures. Clicking through his records, he sets the stage for a warming trend like no other.

By the middle of March, barr had recorded 28 all-time-high temperatures for the winter. The average number of days above freezing in December is 10 and he counted 22. The longest stretch of cold weather this winter, where temperatures stayed below freezing, is seven days in early December. 

In January there were 20 days when temperatures climbed above freezing, when eight is normal. February’s average is 10 days above freezing and barr counted 24. That means the snow was melting on all but four days in February.

February 2026 is the 20th consecutive winter month — and the 60th of the last 64 winter months  — where the number of days above freezing topped his 52-year average for that month.  

He expects the number of days where the thermometer climbed above freezing this winter will more than quadruple the long-term average.  

Where have the songbirds gone? 

As he flips through notebooks and scrolls down databases, the numbers just pour out of barr. 

Averages of averages and record-this and record-that. Even he can get dizzy from the stats that tumble from his tallies. 

“Gosh, if I say that a couple more times it will be like looking in mirrors over and over and over,” he says with a laugh. 

Back to the very worst season of all. What happened toward the end of the horrible 1976-77 winter? A bit of a rebound, barr says, but not enough to rescue a season that ranks as the worst in more than half a century.

In late February 1977, a storm delivered 22 inches of snow in four days, he says, turning yellowed pages, hand-drawn columns and rows filled with the precise details of each day. Another pair of storms in March dumped more than 40 inches. 

Actually, he says, the streak of late-season snow pushed into May at the tail end of the dismal 1976-77 season, adding 86 inches of snow in Gothic, nearly doubling the tally from November through February.

Though he still measures temperatures, water content, snowfall and wind by hand each day at 7 a.m., he no longer jots on paper. For the last 20 years, he has typed everything into his computer. Long ago he transferred his data from notebook to machine and he rarely flips through the old journals. 

“I used to be more detailed,” he says, thumbing through his dated logs filled with single-spaced numbers. 

“Look at this,” he says, pointing to handwritten entries for Feb. 16, 1977. 

The scribbles note cloud cover, wind speeds and wind directions for early morning, midmorning, mid-late morning, afternoon, sundown and sunset. 

He moans. 

“Bores me to look at it,” he says. “Oh, here’s a note: Jan. 12, 1977, two skiers skied by.

Today, barr says, “I’d go nuts” trying to count the parade of skiers schussing past his cabin. He now has a shorthand for cloud cover in his computer entries. But seeing his notes can stir old memories. 

It’s possible this season could see a similar snowy swell. barr turns to his computer and starts scrolling. March 2023 had 102 inches. May 1995 saw 108 inches.

“But it doesn’t seem like we can get that again because it’s going to be so warm,” he says. 

 Another trend: barr jots down wildlife sightings from his cabin. What he’s seeing also is changing. 

“Bird populations are not the same. At least not out here. Maybe that means a lot of birds have found it easier to get seeds by going into town,” he says. 

His old notebooks are filled with descriptions of seed-seeking songbirds; larks and finches and sparrows and the like. Now it’s all corvids. Crows and Steller’s jays and magpies. 

“We haven’t had a good seed crop in a long time … probably eight, nine years,” he says, flipping through a notebook from 2010 where he recorded every bird and mammal sighting.

One more trend he finds fascinating: Snow density is spiking. 

For decades, he rarely counted a year when the snow at his cabin at 9,600 feet climbed past a fluffy-flaked 5% water content. He points his cursor to 2012-13 and shows the average density for that not-great winter reaching 8.83%. And in all but one of the years since, the average density has been at 8%. In the last eight years it’s been more than 8.3%. 

“I mean, the snow we are getting is just slop,” he says. 

“A baseline of understanding” 

A refugee from urban New Jersey, barr spent several years living in a miner’s shack before building his cabin. He remembers the path skiers took in 1977 routed close to his tiny uninsulated hut as they tramped through mud and rocks to reach snowfields higher up the East River Basin. He ended up shoveling snow from the forest to create a path that didn’t pass right by his window. 

He built the cabin where he lives today with a buddy in 1980. He purposely selected a parcel above town to avoid the summer bustle in Gothic, where dozens of scientists flock every year to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, or RMBL. Founded in 1928 in the abandoned silver mining town, RMBL scientists spend summers studying the alpine ecosystems and biology. It is one of the most prolific high-altitude research stations in the world, with scientific projects exploring atmospheric, hydrological and biological shifts over the course of decades. 

And barr’s data are a springboard for much of that science. 

“billy has created a baseline of understanding, a sort of top-line climate context that sets the stage for what the individual scientists are studying,” says Ian Billick, who first studied at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in 1988 and served 25 years as the lab’s executive director before retiring last year. “All of our field scientists are studying the outdoors, and whether it’s plants or marmots or birds or bees, having that environmental context from billy helps us interpret what we are seeing.”

barr’s day job is helping the laboratory with its bookkeeping as the number of scientists and their research days increases. barr also meets with local students and visitors, helping to spark a bit of scientific curiosity.

“Anyone can be a citizen scientist,” he says. 

Ryland Whitacre was among the fifth graders from Crested Butte Elementary School who visited with barr last year. They toured three stations at RMBL and one of their stops was barr’s cabin and his weather plot, where he measures snowfall, density, temperature and wind. 

One of the students asked barr about his favorite food. 

“We ended up having like a 15-minute conversation about chocolate,” the 11-year-old says. 

Ryland, an aspiring pro skier, marveled that barr has not once skied at Crested Butte Mountain Resort. 

“I think that’s so cool,” Ryland says.

Billick says: “billy just lights people up. He is a remarkably social hermit.”

“He is very engaging and interesting and he’s curious about the world and he shares that curiosity very authentically, in a way that really connects with a lot of people,” Billick says. 

“I absolutely love this winter” 

Lots of people have called barr a hermit. But he’s neither monastic nor standoffish. He readily visits with people passing by his cabin on the way up Schofield Pass. He posts daily reports online at gothicwx.org. He’s a bit of a celebrity when he skis into town a few times a year. 

It’s easy to see a snowy cabin far from any road and think he’s solitary and reclusive. But he’s not that much different from the millions of modern-day doomscrollers who spend countless hours sequestered inside. 

This summer, the Gothic Cricket Club he helped found turns 10, with several teams of wicket-guarding scientists swinging bats and sprinting across a dusty pitch. In the winter, barr tends a greenhouse garden heavy with tomatoes and leafy greens that thrive in the low-angle sunshine. He’s got a spring that trickles water into the cabin. He typically struggles with a frozen waterline in winter. But not this winter.

In the corner by a window, he’s got a comfortable chair that gets a lot of sun. That’s where he does his reading. Recently he’s been poring through his father’s Navy journal from World War II in the South Pacific. He’s on Jan. 3, 1943.  

“I guess journaling is in my DNA. I never really thought of it that way,” he says. 

barr gets out to Nordic ski every day. At the end of the day, he winds down with tea and movies. 

He watches a movie every night.

He used to watch VCR tapes. Then DVDs. He’s got hundreds of boxes lining the wall of his man-cave movie room, with a big screen and a projector. 

Now, with improvements to his internet service, he’s been streaming his evening flicks. He just streamed a classic, “Labyrinth,” with David Bowie. His favorite ever remains “The Princess Bride.”

“Usually, over time, I get used to movies and something else comes along but that one, that one hasn’t changed for me,” he says. 

A couple decades ago, the snow-starved landscape would have depressed him. Today, not so much. 

“I absolutely love this winter,” he says. “You know how nice this weather is up here. It snowed a couple days ago and my arthritis kicked in from shoveling snow. First time this season.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.