Just how bad are the gravel roads this mud season? Georgeann Faller can tell you.
Faller, a child care provider, was driving back from a grocery trip to West Lebanon on Wednesday night with her boyfriend and dog, a 12-year-old Chihuahua named Oliver, when her 2003 Nissan Sentra got stuck in the mud on Quinnipiac Road a couple miles from her house in Thetford.
They couldn’t get any cellphone reception from the spot, so they walked in the moonlight — carrying Oliver all the way — to their house on Potato Hill Road, where they were able to call AAA. A couple hours later, a tow truck showed up and towed the car out of the mud patch around midnight.
Thursday morning, the mud patches were so bad that the couple called out from work to avoid the drive.
“I’ve lived here for seven years, and I’ve never seen the roads like this before,” Faller said on Saturday. “But people I talk to who have lived here a long time tell me this is the way it used to be.”
But the story wasn’t over. On Friday, when the couple re-emerged to rejoin the rat race, Faller’s car got stuck in the mud again, this time on Robinson Hill Road, and again they couldn’t get cell reception. They drove her boyfriend’s car to a store where they could get a signal to call AAA for the second time, but a Thetford police officer beat the tow truck to it and unearthed Faller’s car.
It is often said that Northern New England has five seasons: summer, fall, winter, mud and spring. As the snow melts and the ground thaws, dirt roads — technically called gravel roads to distinguish them from paved roads — become oozing pools of gelatinous mush, threatening to strand vehicles in a suction trap.
This year mud season has been particularly ugly, road agents and tow company operators say, and there’s a reason.
March has seen temperatures suddenly swung from below freezing, where they had been for much of the winter, to the low 60s, warming the ground surface. But the earth is still frozen a few inches below the surface, and that frosty layer acts as a seal that forces the groundwater up to turn the road into mud paddies, explained Ted Kenyon, a contractor who said he has pulled four cars with his tractor out of the mud along Dairy Hill Road in South Royalton.
“I’m 80 years old and I’ve lived here 55 years, and I’ve never seen the roads this bad,” Kenyon said Saturday, adding that “all the neighbors are quite appreciative” that he is available for free vehicle rescue missions. He also “as a service” maintains Dairy Hill Road with his own fleet of heavy equipment.
From Wednesday on, alerts have been saturating Upper Valley social media groups and community Listservs with the latest bulletins about roads to avoid: three cars stuck on Turnpike Road in South Strafford on Friday; Wrights Mountain Avenue in Bradford “destroyed”; West Farms Road in Canaan “like quicksand”; Godfrey Road in Thetford “getting pretty miserable”; White Brook Road in Sharon “the worst I’ve seen it”; Beaver Meadow Road from Sharon to Norwich “horrid on both ends;” advisories against “actually, all dirt roads in Cornish.”
In Woodstock, Elijah Lemieux, “in my first mud season” as public works director, said he and two other crew members were out on Friday night addressing mud patches on town roads and on Saturday had to close off Prosper Road between Route 4 and Route 12 to through traffic.
“It’s not impassable, but there is a sink hole and a lot of drivers use Prosper as a shortcut,” Lemieux said.
Mud season, not surprisingly, is a busy time for tow company operators.
Kyle Blakeman, owner of Blakeman Towing in Tunbridge, said that he has received “probably 100 calls” from stranded motorists since Thursday but could respond to only about 25 of them.
And he said he frequently finds himself being called out to the same mud-sogged roads: twice to Dairy Hill Road in South Royalton, where Kenyon has been pulling vehicles out of the mud with his tractor; twice to Johnson Hill Road in South Royalton; and multiple calls on Turnpike Road in Strafford, which he described as “very bad.”
“I’ve been doing this for 14 years, and it’s probably one of the worst,” Blakeman said.
But there are some roads even tow truck operators will not tread.
“If I get a call from Thresher Hill Road (in Randolph), it’s nothing I want to get involved in,” Blakeman said. “Quite honestly, I’ve beat the crap out of my truck going up some of these roads. And at 20,000 pounds, it’s only going to rut up the road worse.”
Sharon Styles, of Thetford, described the mud factor on 5 Corners Road, where she has lived for 17 years, as hitting a “nine or 10” on a scale of one to 10. On Friday morning, on her way to work as a cashier at Wing’s Market in East Thetford, she planned to take 5 Corners to Route 113, but then a driver coming the other way said there was a car stuck in the mud farther down the road.
So Styles turned her 2009 Honda CR-V around and instead planned to take Robinson Hill Road, then turned around where she saw Faller’s Nissan stuck, and backtracked via Quinnipiac Road — the site of Faller’s original Wednesday-night mud debacle.
“I get on Quinnipiac and it was really deep ruts in there, wet bad, and I went sideways and the light is flashing and for some reason I remember to stay on the gas and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god, oh my god, I’m going to be the one stuck on Quinnipiac,’ but I got through,” recalled Styles.
She said the ordeal and roundabout route caused her to arrive at work 15 minutes late, but in one piece. Still, “my heart was pounding,” Styles said.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.