Modern-Day Hermits: Billy in Colorado
When you live alone in the woods for nearly 50 years, you have time to track the weather twice a day and rank your favorite movies in spreadsheets.
By Jessie Schiewe
Billy Barr in front of his home in the Rocky Mountains. (Screenshot from “The Snow Guardian”)
“Modern-Day Hermits” is an ongoing series about the rare and fascinating people who’ve chosen solitude over everything else. Read more of the series here.
Compared to other modern-day hermits, some of whom live in beach shacks and tents in the woods, Billy Barr might as well be living in a mansion.
The lone resident of an abandoned 1880s silver mining town in Gothic, Colorado, Barr’s digs consist of a solar panel-topped wooden cabin that he built himself, with snazzy add-ons like a greenhouse where he grows vegetables and a movie room, complete with a projector, a leather recliner, and two chairs.
When he’s indoors, Barr shuffles around in leather loafers and cable-knit sweaters. His wiry gray-and-white hair is long as is his beard, which he likes to clutch with his fist and pull down on when he’s thinking. He eats a lot of salads and pastas and is a fan of the Newman’s Own brand.
During his free time, he listens to news on the radio, knits, and watches movies. He’s particularly keen on rom-coms and Bollywood films, or, as Barr told NPR, “My tastes are reasonably fluff-oriented.”
If he’s stressed, Barr might put on an animated film, which tends to help take his mind off his woes. A fan of keeping records, Barr also has a running, few-hundred-strong list of his favorite movies and TV shows in a public Google spreadsheet. Included in his top 10 are “Love Actually,” “Notting Hill,” “Princess Bride,” and “Schindler’s List,” with everything on the list seemingly released before 2005.
Barr upgraded his home a few years ago to include a greenhouse and movie room. (Screenshot)
People have been calling Barr a hermit since the ‘80s, and at that point, he’d only been living in Gothic for 10 years. It’s now been 47 years since he first moved to the remote region for a research job at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in 1972 as a 21-year-old college student from Rutgers University. He hasn’t lived anywhere else since then, preferring his isolated lifestyle and the chance “to be around the quiet.”
In the short documentary film “The Snow Guardian,” Barr described his life the following way:
“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.”
Though living as a hermit would be a challenge for most, for Barr it helped him cure the mental health issues he was suffering with.
“I was just getting more and more depressed,” Barr told The Atlantic. “A lot of me moving out there the first few years was just me stabilizing; getting to be around quiet.”
But though he lives a secluded life, Barr doesn’t think of himself as a hermit. He still sees and talks to other people — just not on a daily basis.
Every couple of weeks during the winter, he skis to the nearest town 10 miles away for supplies where he interacts with the people there as well as any skiers he meets en route. He also talks to his sister on the phone and still works for the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (though it’s not clear how often he goes there in-person).
With so much time on his hands, Barr has picked up tactics over the years to stave off boredom. He started by keeping a personal journal but then, after about a decade or so, he went back and read it and thought, “It was so boring. It’s like, ‘OK, enough already. Let me go watch some paint dry.’ ”
However, another boredom solution Barr picked up has been more successful. Since nearly the beginning of his time in Gothic, Barr has been keeping track of the weather, snow levels, and temperature two times a day. He also records observations about wildlife, such as when hibernating animals wake or when certain bird species return to the area.
By the early 2000s, after nearly three decades of entries, Barr’s records were made available to researchers and scientists for use in climate change research and studies.
In The Atlantic, Barr’s work is credited as having “provided an unexpected glimpse back into a world scientists never recorded.”
But Barr doesn’t need to keep records to notice the environmental changes that are happening in Gothic. With each passing year, snowfall is melting faster as well as growing dirtier and more polluted.
The ghost town of Gothic, where Barr’s home is located, was once home to a thriving silver mine that operated from 1879 to 1896. (Flickr/Jeffrey Beall)
In recent years, as his contributions to climate change research have become more well-known, word of Barr has traveled across the internet. The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory even named a building after him: The Billy Barr Community Center.
Barr himself seems pleasantly surprised about the helpfulness of his work, if only because he originally started doing it simply to occupy his time.
“All of a sudden, these decades worth of data were being used for more than my own curiosity,” Barr said in The Snow Guardian.
But when asked how the findings of his research make him feel, Barr was less upbeat:
“I’m not real hopeful because I don't know how you reverse something like that.”
JESSIE SCHIEWE IS THE EDITOR OF OK WHATEVER. SHE BELIEVES IN UNICORNS AND THRIFT SHOPS FOR EXERCISE.
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