from time to time when maybe work or
school gets extra stressful we all
fantasize about just getting away from
it all going to some secluded cabin with
a good book a hot cup of tea and the
desire to meticulously keep track of the
weather
okay well maybe that's just the dream of
the man featured in the short
documentary the snow guardian who became
an
accidental scientific researcher by just
living his life
in peaceful isolation from day's edge
productions
this is the snow guardian and remember
to stick around after the film
for a short q a with the director and
[Music]
producer
have you ever wondered if you watched
the snow long enough
what story is 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 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 and you're sitting
by the fire and you're reading with a
cup of tea
and it goes on for nine 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 said february 26 1978
10 and a half inches of snow that day
january 20th minus 11 and a half
april 28 1980 high was 41
whew in 1997.
one half inch knee snow the weasel was
roaming around
inside the shack damn the birds were
back
i lived in an eight by ten 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
[Music]
i had nothing to prove no goals no
anything
so actually a researcher at 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
billy has done this every day twice a
day
all winter long
i'd 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 snow pack 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 it 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 the the snow pack
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 sick a lot easier
falling on your butt than on your face
[Music]
now let's talk to the filmmakers about
how they found this unique story and
what they learned
from working with billy barr i am morgan
heim
and i was the director on the snow
guardian
neil lozen i'm the co-owner of day's
edge productions
and was also a producer on the snow
guardian
so i first heard about billy barr
in when i went to talk to a friend of
mine about
making this longer film we were working
on called the end of snow
and she at the time worked for a
non-profit in the colorado area and she
was like
well if you're doing anything on snow
you need to reach out to billy he's this
like
amazing person and character and then
talked with neil about him and neil's
like i worked with billy when
when i was at the rocky mountain
biological lab and so all these pieces
just kind of came together
as an undergraduate i did two summers of
research at the rocky mountain
biological lab where billy works
and in the summers it's a really busy
vibrant place with you know 100 to 150
researchers from all over the world
doing science up in the mountains and in
the winter it dwindles down to
more or less just billy and sometimes a
couple of winter caretakers taking care
of the facilities in town
you'll see this in the film but we don't
describe like the mechanics of it
but he has these platforms that are
outside of his
cabin and then from the platforms
there's you know these measuring sticks
sticking up and so
in the morning and in the evening he
goes out and he measures
the snow accumulation on those platforms
and he
will also take a same size section
like a circumference of snow patch from
that platform
each time he measures and he will go and
he'll weigh it
and he'll get you know basically volume
and accumulation
and he just does that every every day
twice a day and he's done that for over
40 years
i know he's continued to collect the
data i know people are continuing to use
it
um and people are continuing to do all
kinds of interesting
ecology research up there at the rocky
mountain biological lab
mostly in the summer because it's a much
more accessible place that time of year
um but billy's still up there he's still
collecting his data he plans to keep
doing so as
as long as he can
[Music]
one of the things that this story
featuring billy shows is that
um you know to tell a great science
story
your lead character doesn't have to be a
scientist
in the conventional sense i mean billy
collects data
but he's not formally trained as a
climatologist or a meteorologist or
anything like that
he's just a guy who's passionate about
something and i think that kind of
passion is really
infectious you know the other thing that
i think is
is interesting about billy is that um
i don't think he's a very um
i don't want this to sound the wrong way
but i think it's fair to say he's not a
very
relatable character tool to a lot of
people like
i don't think a lot of people watch this
film and say i want to do that
and but at the same time i don't think
that's necessary i think too often we're
told that like
that our messengers in our stories need
to be people who are just like our
audience people who our audience can
relate to
and i don't think that's necessarily
true i think if someone is interesting
enough
they can be very different from the
audience and still
be compelling still be somebody that the
audience wants to watch
we know that good stories have strong
characters and i think a lot of times
especially in
documentary and in science we can get
caught up in plot
and and and
plots can be interesting but if you
don't have a good character
to kind of be your guide through that
it's still going to be much harder to
tell that story in a compelling way and
so when you find
a character as strong as billy it almost
doesn't matter what the plot is
because they are so fascinating and
interesting and you can tie
all sorts of other values into
wanting to stay connected with that
character that even if someone isn't
interested in snowpack accumulation
like they're so interested in him that
they want to stay with him
and they want to then they end up
learning about snoke pack
thanks for joining us again for seeker
indie our new short documentary
spotlight series
we're excited to keep bringing you
stories from science you may have never
heard before
thanks for watching and we'll see you
next time on seeker