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Unit 7 The Snow Guardian

Billy Barr, known as the "snow guardian", lives alone in a cabin in the woods and has kept meticulous records of snowfall for over 40 winters, recording measurements twice daily all winter long. He has no running water or electricity and spends his winters reading by the fire and observing the weather and local wildlife. Though he began recording snow levels out of personal curiosity, his decades of data are now used scientifically to analyze trends. Barr has observed that the region now gets snow later in the season, loses it sooner, and is experiencing more warm days, resulting in less overall snowpack that supplies water to the southwest.

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Plaink Resst
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220 views2 pages

Unit 7 The Snow Guardian

Billy Barr, known as the "snow guardian", lives alone in a cabin in the woods and has kept meticulous records of snowfall for over 40 winters, recording measurements twice daily all winter long. He has no running water or electricity and spends his winters reading by the fire and observing the weather and local wildlife. Though he began recording snow levels out of personal curiosity, his decades of data are now used scientifically to analyze trends. Barr has observed that the region now gets snow later in the season, loses it sooner, and is experiencing more warm days, resulting in less overall snowpack that supplies water to the southwest.

Uploaded by

Plaink Resst
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Unit 7 The Snow Guardian

Narrator 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.

billy barr I spell it, small b-i-l-l-y, small b-a-r-r.

Narrator Some people call him the snow guardian. He lives in a cabin out in the woods.

billy barr 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.

Narrator 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.

billy barr Okay... February 26th, 1978, ten and a half inches of snow that day. January
28th, minus eleven and a half. April 28th, 1980, I was forty-one. Oh, that sounds
nice. 1997, one-half inch knee snow, a weasel was roaming around inside the
shack, and the birds were back.

I lived in a 8-by-10 foot old shack. I 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. I had nothing to prove, no goals, no anything. So, actually, the
researchers, 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.

Narrator billy has done this every day, twice a day, all winter long.

billy barr I keep going until the snow is gone. If it snowed, I record that no matter when.

The trend I see is that we’re getting a permanent snowpack 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 snow sooner than years that had a lot less snow, just
because it’s a lot warmer now.

Narrator In a normal winter, you’d expect to have 4 to 5 record high temperatures. Last
year, billy recorded 36.
billy barr Not only is it a lot warmer, we’re getting a lot of dust blowing in. Soon as you
get dust on the snow, it melts like that. You’re talking about 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.

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