Yes, This Year's Mud Season Is Worse Than Usual In Vermont

On Vermont's dirt roads, and in our own yards, like this
photo of my boots deep in the muck in St. Albans,
this has been quite a mud season

 Everybody's been talking about it. 

The thick, oozing, tire and boot sucking seemingly bottomless mud in Vermont this month.  

The mud gods seem to have conspired to give us a particularly nasty mud season.  Nobody is especially happy about it, except maybe tow truck drivers. And even there, I have my doubts about their level of glee.

You can't do much about the mud, really, so we just complain about it. And hope for a nice patch of dry, warm weather to solve the problem. Good luck with that. 

We all chuckle at the mud, of course, but it's potentially dangerous. If there's an emergency on one of those rutted, mired roads, how are you going to get a fire truck or an ambulance up there? What about some 85 year old who lives on such a back road? They can't drive in that, and nobody can reach them. What do you expect our elderly friend to do? Hike five miles to the store over on the paved road then haul his load of groceries the five miles back home?

VTDigger reports that some communities have ATVs at the ready to respond to emergencies in mud-bogged areas.

WHY SO MUDDY?

Several factors dating all the way back to January conspired to leave us bogged down in the muck.

It didn't really snow all that much this winter, so there wasn't much of a protection to keep the ground from freezing.  January was cold, the nippiest month since February, 2015 and the coldest January since 2009. 

We had a large number of particularly cold, subzero nights, which really helped drive the frost deep into the ground.  Banana Belt Burlington had 17 days that were at or below zero in January, for instance. 

February was much warmer, with several balmy spells. The upper few inches of gravel on roads did thaw, but the warm spells were accompanied by rain which saturated things even more before they re-froze. Several bouts of sleet and freezing rain throughout the winter didn't help, as that ice from the sky hermetically sealed the frozen ground to wait for a real, sustained thaw. 

Then March hit. It's been a warm month, so the thaws began in earnest. That really accelerated the melting, quickly turning the upper levels of gravel to sludge.

Most critically, we had long spells in which a string of consecutive nights stayed above freezing. 

If you want both a great maple sugaring season and a not-so-bad mud season, you want dry, sunny, breezy days that get up above freezing in the afternoon, then below 32 for at least several hours at night. 

In that freeze/thaw weather regime, the roads do thaw and get muddy. But the warm March afternoon sun and the dry breezes tend to make things less mucky. The overnight freezes harden up the muck. The end result is a gradual ground thawing, and the ruts don't get that deep on those gravel roads

This year, we had periods in which afternoon temperatures that spiked into the upper 40s to mid 60s, making things melt fast. We had strings of overnight lows above freezing, so the mucky roads would never have a chance to harden up and some of the moisture to evaporate. 

The result was the mire we're living with. Check out the descriptions and photos in VPR's Brave Little State for just a taste of it all, in case you somehow feel left out. 

WHY MUD IS LINGERING 

The ground thaws from the top down. When there's a thick layer of frozen ground, the mud lingers on top because the water can't percolate deeper into the ground. The frost below blocks it. Things only improve when all the layers of the soil thaw out. There's not much relief until that happens.  

The current weather is about to make things worse. Or at least prolong the misery. 

Temperatures will fall below freezing later today and stay that way for most of us until Wednesday afternoon. This will give the ground a chance to re-freeze. The ground will certainly not refreeze to anywhere near the depths it froze back in those subzero nights in January.  

But a thin layer will re-freeze, then thaw again once it inevitably warms up later in the week. Meanwhile, the ground several inches below the surface hasn't thawed yet, and that will have to wait until we see more spring weather. 

As VT Digger reports, climate change could make mud seasons trend worse.  Less snow accumulates in the winter than in the past, allowing the frost to bore deeper into the ground, as it did this year. 

VT Digger also came up with something I surely hadn't thought of, but kind of makes sense. Thawing comes sooner, so mud season comes sooner. Mud season usually firmly comes to an end when trees bud and bloom, because those reawakening trees draw moisture from the ground, drying it out some. 

Trees are leafing out a bit sooner, too, but not by much, since factors other than warmth, like sunlight are at play for plants. This means there's a longer wait from the time the thawing starts to the time trees leaf out. That would mean a longer, potentially more intense mud season.

All good things come to an end, and so do most bad things. It will dry out eventually, and perhaps by the end of the month, we can actually drive down Vermont's gravel roads once again.