High Points: The fifth season

We all have our favorite season in the Rockies.

There is an oft-repeated old Aspen adage: “I came for the winters, but I stay for the summers.” And if you ask just about anyone who lives here, they’ll tell you that fall and spring are the best seasons of the year. Yep, all of the four seasons have their distinct charms.

But right now, we find ourselves in the midst of what can only be called our fifth season: mud season.

Melting snow from our recent warm spells have turned the snow on our sidewalks into dusty paths and our dusty paths into trails of mud. The dirt roads that many of us live on and drive daily are slippery with quicksand-like soils that catch and release the snow tires of our cars and coat the undercarriages with a thick residue of dirt. Have you seen the lines at the car washes lately?

And it’s a little bit early for us to be in this quagmire. While we normally get a solid dose of mud season in late March and live with it through the showers of April and the rains of May, we are not even officially to spring yet. We are supposed to be covered in snow, as March is traditionally our snowiest month.   

It seemed like just last week the problem was ice, as we slipped and slid our way down the streets. The “freeze-thaw” cycle that we were in not only solidified the ski slopes, but it also made walking treacherous. I’ve heard of more injuries taking place from falls on the ice this year than from falls on the mountains. And now that we are in the “thaw” portion of that cycle, we have reverted to mud season.

As you may have guessed, I live on one of those dirt roads I mentioned — a long dirt road that normally costs me a small fortune to keep clear each winter. While I don’t like writing the checks, this season we have had just a handful of days when we have needed to be plowed and honestly, I feel bad for the folks who make their living keeping my road accessible. It’s worth it to shell out the big bucks for the pleasure of having a solid snow season.

I like looking over the fields and seeing the tip-tops of the sage brush get swallowed with each storm, until there is nothing left but a smooth pristine sea of snow. I like to drive down my white ribbon of a road with the snow piled window high, or even higher, as it forms little wind whipped curls of ice on the top of the drifts. But this year, there has been just a few days where we have had enough snow to make that happen.

Instead, we’ve got mountains of mud. This week, I took my dog for a run on the aforementioned dirt road and, when we got home, the dog was coated in the crusty debris of the road, and my HOKAs had become a pair of never-ever-be-able-to-wear-them-again shoes. Yuk.

You might remember an old character from Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts” cartoon strip who went by the name of Pig-Pen and was always covered in dirt and dust. That’s what I feel like. If I leave or come home after, say, 8:30, on a sunny morning, I am prepared for the road to have morphed from frozen dirt into slimy mud. It’s the burden I bear in this, the fifth season.

Let’s hope that winter hasn’t left us in the mud just yet.