The site of the RMBL was once a silver boomtown in the 1880s, but within a decade it’d been abandoned for richer mines elsewhere. In 1928, a biology professor rediscovered the area and founded what is now a summer pilgrimage of scientists. Researchers at the lab sleep in cabins and university department presidents and lowly students share mess hall tables, working side-by-side on long-term conservation studies. One of the lab’s longest-running studies is a wildflower research project started by ecologist David Inouye.

The same year Barr would become Gothic’s only permanent resident, in 1973, Inouye measured some 30 plots to study wildflowers. By recording when and how long flowers bloomed Inouye and a handful of scientist hoped to draw correlations to the insects and birds that feed upon them. This research has since been used in many studies and is particularly important to understanding how climate change alters flower blooming times, the animals that depend on them, and thus the rest of Gothic Mountain’s ecology. And by extension, to high alpine environments everywhere. The idea for the study arose out of a casual conversation, and that is part of RMBL’s beauty. A similar beautiful fluke would lead Inouye to discover Barr’s 40 years of data.

Barr had intended to spend one summer in Gothic as a research student. In 1972 he was 21 years old, a shy, skinny guy studying environmental science at Rutgers University. The summer before he’d shoveled shit and hay at a dairy farm and he was ready for a change. The field of conservation was still small back then, so even though he had little experience, when he saw the RMBL was looking for help with a water chemistry project, Barr applied.

One of the first newspaper interviews Barr gave—long after he’d become known in the nearby town as the eccentric mountain man—romanticized his escape to Gothic, painting him as Thoreauvian. “He climbed to a nearby mountain peak the day he made that decision and sat in the waning daylight… ” The reality is that he couldn’t hack the regular world. “I was just getting more and more depressed,” Barr, now 66 years old, told me. “A lot of me moving out there the first few years was just me stabilizing; getting to be around quiet.”

Gothic is about 10 miles from the nearest town. In the winter the road is closed and it's unreachable except by backcountry skis on a trail that cuts through dangerous avalanche territory. His first winter, Barr lived in a tent as long as he could bear. When snow piled up he moved into the abandoned 8-by-10-foot mining shack. It had a wood-burning stove and a bed, but its true value lay in its messy chain of title.

The RMBL seemed to think the cabin belonged to the U.S. Forest Service. And the Forest Service thought it belonged to the RMBL. A local man also claimed to own it, so amid this triangle of confusion Barr found a home. Barr seemed to spend all day that first winter chopping wood. He’d wake before sunrise, eat, ski into the woods, cut down a dead tree, eat, haul it back, then split the logs for a fire. In the hope that it would keep him busy at night, and thinking that it might come in handy next winter, he began to track the snow levels and the wildlife on his treks into the woods. “Under kerosene light you can’t do much,” Barr told me. “And after a few years I had something to compare each winter with.”

The mining shack Billy Barr first lived in / Billy Barr

In the summer he took odd jobs, working on a hotshot crew fighting wildfires, and later washing dishes in the RMBL’s kitchen. Each year, the RMBL seemed to operate on a prayer. No one tracked the bills, and the distracted scientists came and left without much thought for the lab’s upkeep. In the late 1970s Barr became the unofficial caretaker, shutting off the water so the pipes wouldn’t freeze, keeping an eye on the research equipment. In return the lab let him borrow its car parked at the bottom of the mountain so he could drive into town for supplies. Barr always considered himself a numbers guy, and as a kid growing up in Trenton, New Jersey, he kept detailed baseball stats on his favorite players. When the RMBL’s then-director found out, he suggested Barr take an accounting class through the mail. In the early 1980s Barr became the lab’s accountant.