During the last couple decades, scientists at the RMBL have become fascinated with climate change’s impact on plants and animals in the high alpines, hoping to scale their discoveries into broader lessons about life in a warmer earth. This has continued now for 44 years.īarr’s data would likely have remained the tinkerings of an amateur scientist were he not so close to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), one of the most important phenology research sites in the world. He filled a notebook with these observations then another notebook. So he measured snow levels, animal tracks, and in spring the first jubilant calls of birds returning. Barr had moved from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains precisely because of the solitude, but he couldn’t escape boredom. The cold winds blew through the shack’s wood slat walls as if they didn’t exist he shared the bare dirt floor with a skunk and pine marten, his only regular company for much of the year. In 1973 Barr had dropped out of college and made his home an abandoned mining shack at the base of Gothic Mountain, a 12,600-foot stone buttress. “I didn’t know anything about climate change at the time.” By no means, Barr told me, having skied down from his cabin to use the nearest phone, did he set out to make a vital database for climate change scientists. It started as a curiosity, a task to busy his mind during the winter. It was a year into his life alone in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains when Billy Barr began his recordings.