Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak.   Just two miles South of Rollinsville sits a mysterious brick building. Were it located anywhere else, the three story structure which is tan, square, and plain, would be totally unassuming, but here, surrounded by woods and petite cabins, the municipal physique sticks out, begging the interest of passers-by who inevitably wonder what’s inside. A bunker? A secret government hide out? Or, my comparatively tame guess: Apartments?

It’s physicist and climate columnist for The Mountain Ear, Clyde Burnett, who dispels the guesswork, as scientists are wont to do, and invites me inside for some answers. Clyde is, perhaps, the one who knows the building best: his dog’s hair is still stuck in the wheel of his office chair upstairs and he admits to having a few of the plates from the commissary in his kitchen back home. Having spent 30-odd-years inside these walls, the building is his second home, and the place where he compiled the lengthiest and most complete research on hydroxyl in the world to date.

Originally though, the building came with different intentions, built in the 1960s as a lodge for tourists, replete with a big wooden bar and dormitory style accommodations. Soon though the building was converted into a laboratory, first by scientists at CU who’d come way up high to study the Aurora, and later by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which converted the various wall-papered covered rooms into floral-walled offices and pastel-plaid labs, a few of which were for lasers which, by Clyde’s accounts, were just as exciting as they sound.

But since the late 1990s the building has been underused and with the exception of Clyde (and very few others) mostly vacant and, in recent months, NOAA has begun the work of emptying the building, selling off equipment and piling mid-60’s style furniture into a large heap near the fireplace (a picker’s fantasy, if only one could get inside). Although hardly anything remains, there are still desks with pens sitting atop paper and still chalkboards covered with equations as if when the scientists left, they didn’t know they wouldn’t be coming back. And so it is with Clyde who, after talking with me for two hours about science and math and other subjects way over my head, stands peering over piles upon piles of his papers from long ago.

“Clyde, do you have a desire to take any of this?” Asks caretaker of the Fritz, Wanda Sundquist. “It’s all charts, charts and charts and more charts. They are in zero order of any kind, willy nilly, and all the time.”

Without getting out of his chair at the opposite end of the long table, Clyde shakes his head, “No need, it’s all published,” he says.

“But Clyde, we are asking for a very specific reason because all of it’s ready to go to paper recycle. We have been waiting for a chance to ask you before we send it off, to make sure you don’t want it. Everything else is gone, this is all that’s left, so take what you want.”

Clyde, again: “It’s all published.”

But as for me, I’m easily seduced by the treasure trove, and I can’t help but stand up to do the work Clyde seems uninterested in doing. I unwind cords off of bundles and leaf through yellowed papers covered with equations I don’t understand. I dig through piles of canvas covered binders, marked with 60’s style sans serif fonts on the covers and filled with painstakingly hand-drawn graphs. There are lots of bound notebooks, each filled with daily observations of hydroxyl levels, like a diary kept for the atmosphere at 25,000 km up in the air. The more I scrounge the more the smell of old libraries spews from the stacks and I’m overcome with a wave of nostalgia that can’t possibly belong to me because, with no computers in sight, this isn’t my world. It’s a scene I’ve only ever imagined, right here before my eyes, leaving its impression in increasingly cryptic cursive marks on paper thicker than any I’ve felt before.

“Clyde, isn’t this wonderful?” I say, trailing off into another pile of paper.

“Well, I guess I should just take a look,” he says, finally convinced, hoisting himself up with his walker.

After a minute of watching him walk in wide circles around the table I ask: “How does this feel to look at?”

“I have no feeling at all,” and then, predictably, “It’s all been published.”

“No,” Wanda says. “This represents the uncountable number of hours that each of those published papers includes, Clyde. I’m going to go get a sack in case there’s something you want to take home.” (There isn’t).

But Wanda’s right, the table’s contents can’t be summed up by what they produced. These piles of paper symbolize the intangibles: time spent, research completed, knowledge gained and, importantly, problems solved. There’s a lifetime summed up in those pages, destined for the dump.

Clyde’s just spent the last two hours detailing the publishable research bundled up in front of us: the 33-year series of measurements he took at the Fritz, which is the longest data set in the world related to the ozone problem. Starting in 1977, with research support from the National Science Foundation and NASA, Clyde designed and built a tool to measure hydroxyl levels in the atmosphere which collected at the Fritz Lab, and around the world, in Florida, Alaska, Micronesia and New Zealand.

Just three years later, in 1980, scientists would discover ozone depletion and, Clyde’s research, showing a corresponding 40 percent increase in hydroxyl levels in the atmosphere, helped to clarify the problem at hand.

The ozone depleting culprit would later be identified as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and the world would famously spring to action to address and solve the problem. But because of Clyde’s research we would know how our atmosphere had been forever changed and so learn that, for every cause, there is an effect.

His two-hour science talk was fascinating, but at times I admit struggling to keep up with the terminology and somewhere around the time he broke out the blueprints for the pepsiosis optical machine he’d designed and built, science stopped making sense altogether. And so, I let my mind wander around the image instead, tracing the pairs of jagged parallel lines converging in two cones directed at one another’s points. In the background Clyde was talking in numbers like a language with the potential to save the world while I was stuck inside my head with questions formed in words like “love” and “family,” and even though they could not save a single life, I wondered how they had touched Clyde’s.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” I interrupted.

Clyde nodded.

“What about love?”

“What?” He said before pointing to Leslee, a woman sitting on the other side of the table, “She’s my love,” looking me as if to ask if it were okay to return to science now.

It was easier to talk about science, easier even to talk about his little A-frame cabin on Lump Gulch, the one that backs to national forest, the one he’s lived in for 29 years. Easier to show pictures of horse drawn carriages he used to drive as a kid on a farm in Iowa, or of his since-trashed little green pinto (yes, the ones notorious for exploding engines), the one he drove to the top of the Continental Divide through the now defunct Needle Eye Tunnel.

The next day though, he would send me an email: “Circumstances at observatory not ideal. Leslee is my neighbor, my love. Leslee is my woman.” He would go on to talk about his ex-wife and his children, the people that Clyde had loved and loved still. Of course, Clyde had love in his heart. Anyone who has read his climate column in The Mountain-Ear knows he cares deeply about our planet and its people, but his readers also won’t be surprised if he’s not too romantic about the details. Once a month Clyde writes to us imploringly, in no uncertain terms, begging us to pay attention to global warming and to do our part to combat climate change.

In one of his first columns in 2014 he writes: “Our planet’s natural laws of heat trapping by the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect have been plodding along without pause. And Earth’s response will occur independently of our awareness of the cause.”

The tone is a bit blithe, but not to be taken for uncaring. As a scientist who has mapped our understanding of some dire environmental problems, and who has seen the world take unprecedented collective action to fix said problems, Clyde knows solutions don’t come easily. He’s worried that this time around we failed to act and must now confront our fate. But even so, when our time together comes to an end and I’m on my way out the door, Clyde stops me.

“Climate change is a big problem. It’s the big problem. We need to do everything we can to fix it. We, each of us, need to be leaders.”

“Are you optimistic then?” I ask.

“No,” he says, without giving it a second thought.

And it’s that image of Clyde, obstinately blocking my way and shaking his head, that will always be irascible in my mind. In that moment he had become for me the archetypal herald, guarding the threshold at the point of no return. Having seen and danced with the enemy of global destruction during his life, he was now warning me, still fresh on my hero’s journey, that the line had been crossed, and that, while there was probably nothing to be done, I had better try to do everything I possibly could to save the world.

Mountain Folk Tales is a weekly column about locals living along the Peak-to-Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.

(Originally published in the January 17, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)