Between all the snow and freezing weather that comes this time of year, mud season has arrived yet again in Teller County. This means that things like getting your car washed and dodging potholes have returned.

Potholes seem to multiply faster than the tents do each Friday every summer at Woodland Park’s fabled Farmers Market. Most of us have learned to swerve around them with the skill of a seasoned racecar driver on an obstacle course, but that doesn’t change the fact that some of these craters have been around long enough to qualify as historic landmarks.

Take Woodland Park for example. Last summer’s big roadwork project somehow became last fall’s roadwork project, which then seemed to stretch briefly into winter. Lake Avenue, despite receiving a healthy sum of taxpayer dollars, looks disappointingly similar to what it did before a thousand hours were spent deleting it only to put it all back together a few months later. And while I’m sure there was a reason for tearing it up in the first place, I can’t shake the feeling that other roads needed it more.

My family has an ongoing joke about waiting for the “ghost cars” at certain intersections in this town that have already received their high-tech makeovers at certain signalized intersections. We all know about those infuriating red lights that demand we wait for nonexistent traffic. Given how few stoplights exist in Teller County, timing them properly shouldn’t be rocket science, yet here we are, stopped in the middle of nowhere, double-checking to make sure imaginary cars aren’t actually crossing.

Up in my neck of the woods, we’re gearing up for a $7 million road project on Highway 67 that’s expected to last until next winter. They are already strewing out various colored landscape flags that portend a continuation of last year and every year before that in my memory.

While I understand the need for street improvements, I can’t help but feel like we’re trapped in an eternal loop of construction. We patch one road only to find another crumbling, we expand driving lanes at the cost of a seasons’ delay only to save 10 seconds per trip thereafter, and we pave fresh asphalt only to see a new set of potholes forming before the paint dries.

At this point, the only certainty about our roads is that they will never truly be finished. The seasons will change, the mud will dry, the snow will return and, like clockwork, the orange cones will rise again. Maybe road work isn’t just about fixing the streets, it’s also about giving us all something to talk about while we wait at yet another unnecessary red light.

And if all else fails, at least the potholes keep our reflexes sharp. Who needs a professional obstacle course when you live in Teller County?

Ruth Wiseman is a Woodland Park native and a dual-enrolled high school student attending Pikes Peak State College.