For about four weeks, the road won't let us out.

When mud season is

Mud season in the Northeast Kingdom runs roughly from the third week of March through the third week of April, depending on the year. In 2024 it began 22 March and ended 21 April. In 2025 it began 18 March and ended 12 April (a dry spring). In 2026 it began 25 March and is closing now, the second week of May, on schedule.

The state of Vermont and the towns themselves classify roads on a 4-tier system. Class 1 and 2 roads are paved or gravel-and-graded; they handle truck traffic year-round. Class 3 roads are local town highways with seasonal weight restrictions. Class 4 roads are unmaintained tracks. During mud season, town road foremen post "no through traffic" or "no truck traffic" signs on class-3 roads when frost movement makes them impassable; VTrans publishes the underlying classification but the call belongs to the town. Each town's road foreman has the authority and uses it.

What this means for the work

Roughly 35% of our service area's customers live on class-3 roads. During mud season, we cannot reach them with the service van without risking either: getting stuck for two hours; damaging the road and being on the receiving end of a polite letter from the road foreman; or breaking a town weight ordinance and being on the receiving end of a less-polite letter from the constable. None of these outcomes are good.

So we plan around it. The shop's calendar reorganizes itself in March. New non-urgent installs (J-01, J-03, J-05) get scheduled for either pre-March or post-mid-April. Heritage rewires (J-04) we book for January and February — see the Cabot Hill entry for why mid-winter is the right window for those.

Bench work and heritage planning

The shop fills up during mud season. The bench gets pre-fabricated work that has been backlogging since fall: panel rough-ins, custom enclosure modifications, conduit-bending day, the tool calibration that always needs doing. Marya does her annual paperwork stretch — re-license filings, insurance renewals, the cooperative's IRS Form 1120-C due in April.

It is also when we do quotes for any major heritage rewire customers we're going to start in May or June. The walk-through can usually happen in mud season — driving someone's class-3 road in a passenger car is fine; it's the truck full of materials and tools that the road won't take. So the J-04 customer who we'll start work on May 15th gets their walk-through April 8th. The bench staging happens the week of May 7th. The work itself starts the day after the road foreman pulls the placards.

What we still take

• Emergencies for existing customers. We will walk in if we have to. We have, twice in twelve years, taken a hand cart on a class-3 road to a heritage farmhouse with a panel that was venting smoke. The walk-in radius is realistically about a mile.
• Class-1 and class-2 customers. Towns and villages stay reachable. Hardwick proper, Greensboro Bend village, East Hardwick, the centers of Cabot, Plainfield, Marshfield. Maybe 60% of our service area.
• Bench work for any customer. A drop-off at the South Main shop of a panel cover for new labels, or a meter-base for a repair? We can do it.
• Quotes and walk-throughs everywhere. The car goes anywhere the truck doesn't.

What we don't take

• Non-urgent installs requiring the van on class-3 roads. Postponed to post-mud-season.
• Bulk-material delivery to a class-3 site. Same.
• Same-day diagnostic visits to class-3 sites for problems that aren't safety issues.

Why we tell you about this

Because if you're reading this in February and you call us in March hoping for a pre-mud-season install, the answer might genuinely be "we can quote it now and start in late April." That's not a soft pass; that's the road foreman's calendar. NWS Burlington publishes a frost-depth product that we check weekly during the transition; if the year is dry and the frost has already left a particular hill, sometimes we can sneak a job in. We won't know for sure until the road foreman calls.

The cooperative's annual cycle

Mud season also includes our annual rotation of the after-hours dispatch. Marya took the rotation 2014–2017; Desmond 2017–2020; Anouk 2020–2023; Skye is on it through March 2027. The rotation begins on the first Monday of March each year — chosen because nothing important happens that week, traditionally; the rotating dispatcher gets to be at home for the four weeks of mud season as a kind of break-in period.