He Spent 40 Years Alone in the Woods, and Now Scientists Love Him | Short Film Showcase

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. You're sitting by the fire, and you're reading with a cup of tea. It goes on for 9 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 at February 26th, 1978: 10 1/2 in of snow that day. January 20th - 11 1/2. April 28th, 1980: high was 41. Oo, that sounds nice. In 1997: 1/2 in new snow; a weasel was roaming around inside the shack. Damn, the birds were back!

I live in an 8x1 ft old shack and had no electricity, no water, and I had nothing. I mean, I was just there all day. The main thing I interacted with was the weather and the animals, so I started recording things just 'cause it was something to do. I had nothing to prove, no goals, no anything.

Actually, a researcher to a 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. The trend I see is that we're getting a permanent snowpack later, and we get to be ground sooner. We'll have years where there was a lot of snow on the ground and then we lost snow sooner than years that 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 this—the snowpack, the water supply for most of the Southwest.

I'm not real hopeful just because 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. Actually, learning to fall is probably the most important thing. You're going to fall; it's a lot easier falling on your butt than on your face.