As soon as I turn onto the dirt, it’s bumpety-bump. And more bumps. It’s a combination of miles of potholes combined with ripple of washboard. It’s pothole season, and mud season.
Every time it rains or snows, and the moisture melts, it doesn’t take long for potholes and waves of washboard to form. No sooner do they grade the road, then a more holes form.
The normal mud season is late April/early May when the last of the winter snows melt. But this year, we keep getting rain, we’ve had a second mud season, one that has lasted the entire month. Because we live off a network of dirt roads, and have a dirt driveway, in addition to the dirt trails in the neighborhood, the mud is everywhere. Every time it rains, there are little rivulets of water streaming across the roads, down the hillsides. It’s hard to take more than ten steps outside the front door without walking through mud or puddles.
If you remember the old Subaru commercials from many years ago, that showed Subarus careening through the mountains, crashing through the streams, only to show the car at the end of the commercial covered in mud, you’ll get the idea of what our car looks like.
I accepted a long time ago that I would have a dusty car living in the mountains, but now it’s a splattered car. I’ve pretty much given up on trying to wash it, because the next day it’s back to the mud. The one bonus to this is my license plate is so splattered with mud, you can’t even really read the numbers. So, if by chance I get nabbed by the “Speedy Van” at the bottom of Boulder Canyon, I probably wouldn’t get a ticket. The “Speedy Van” is a minivan type vehicle that is set up with radar and takes a picture of vehicles that are more than 10 miles over the speed limit. Then they send you a letter asking you to pay a fine of $40.
The biggest problem with the mud is trying to arrive at work looking halfway clean. Between walking the dogs in the morning, and trying to avoid the splatter from cars driving down the road to just trying to get out of my car without getting mud all over the pants, it’s a challenge each and every day. It wasn’t until I went to the restroom after having been at work for three hours, that I realized I had dried mud all over the back of both my pant legs. Whey don’t people ever tell you these things?
There is hope though. June will bring drier and warmer weather, but also increased risk of wildfires. It’s always something when you live in the mountains.
