mud season

noun

plural mud seasons

: a time of year (such as early spring) that is characterized by excessively muddy ground

For Colorado hikers, trail runners and mountain bikers, spring is mud season. Warm sunny periods punctuated by heavy spring snowstorms turn trails in and near the foothills into muddy messes …—

John Meyer

… each mud season a spring pushes up through the concrete, first dribbling, then gushing icy water from the depths of the earth into our cellar.—

Jules Older

… one of the worst (and most widespread) mud seasons in years, closing a number of central Vermont back roads and isolating a number of us at home.—

Rutland (Vermont) Herald

Examples of mud season in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web The mountain had got a couple of feet of fresh snow the previous week, but now winter was in swift retreat and mud season was nigh. —

Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, 9 Apr. 2024 Beverly Wight Smith has seen a lifetime of Maine mud seasons in this former farming town. —

Ashley Milne-Tyte, The Christian Science Monitor, 26 Mar. 2024 March in Vermont is also mud season, when the thaw begins to trickle onto dirt roads, challenging even the most stalwart Subaru. —

Tom Vanderbilt, Travel + Leisure, 27 Aug. 2023 Vermont's mud season, which occurs just after the ski resorts hang up their poles for the year, slowly gives way to lush summer greenery and wildflowers galore, but those in the know agree the best time of year to visit is fall. —

Stacey Lastoe, Travel + Leisure, 16 Aug. 2023 Besides spring, summer, fall, and winter, there is mud season, when Vermont’s 8,000 miles of unpaved roads turn to mush as winter turns to spring, and stick season, when the trees are bare, the white birches breathtaking in their nakedness as fall slides silently into winter. —

Kevin Cullen, BostonGlobe.com, 1 June 2023 New England is in the middle of mud season, an evocative name for the time of year when the sun melts the ice in the top layers of soil, leaving deeper layers still frozen. —

Melissa Mohr, The Christian Science Monitor, 27 Mar. 2023 Parts of Russia and Ukraine have mud seasons too. —

Melissa Mohr, The Christian Science Monitor, 27 Mar. 2023 Weeks of freezing temperatures and now the onset of the mud season have sapped their strength, soldiers said. —

Carlotta Gall Daniel Berehulak, New York Times, 6 Mar. 2023

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'mud season.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.