Mud Season Break: How Our Family Uses Colorado's April Week

The first April we lived in our mountain town, I asked another mom at pickup what "mud season" actually meant. She looked at me with the patient, slightly amused expression I have come to associate with locals talking to people who moved here from the East Coast via Mexico, and she said: "It's the worst time of year. Don't be here for it."

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She wasn't entirely joking. Mud season is the four-to-six-week stretch in mountain towns when the ski mountain has closed for the season, the hiking trails haven't dried out, the lakes haven't thawed enough to do anything with, and every single restaurant in town is either closed for an annual reset or running on a skeleton crew. The school district reads the room and gives the kids a partial break — sometimes a full week, sometimes a couple of professional development days strung together — and the families who can leave, leave. We can leave. So we do.

Why mud season break is the under-the-radar best break

If I were going to pick one travel week to advocate for, it would be this one. Hear me out.

It often lines up with Holy Week. Some years the Colorado mud-season break and the Mexican Semana Santa overlap exactly. When they do, the alignment is a gift — you fly into a country that is on break with you, and SMA is alive in the way it is during national holidays.
The U.S. spring break has already happened. By the time the mountain-town break hits, most U.S. schools have already done their spring break in March. Airfares are quieter. Hotels are quieter.
The shoulder-season thesis. I have come to believe, after a lot of trips, that shoulder season is the only good season for travel with a kid. Peak season has the crowds. Off-season has the closures. Shoulder season has the weather and a non-zero number of restaurants open. Mud-season break is the most extreme U.S. version of shoulder season I know of.

Desert canyon spring landscape Utah Arizona — Moab the first April we tried it. Bella ran six miles of slickrock in flip-flops. I have never let her wear flip-flops on a hike since.

How we actually use it

Year one: back to SMA, lining up with Semana Santa

Bella was in pre-K. The Colorado break was the second week of April. The Mexican Holy Week was the second week of April. We flew into León and were back in our old courtyard within four hours of landing.

What I want you to know about being in SMA during Semana Santa: the processions through the historic center are the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed and also the most overwhelming thing for a four-year-old. We watched one full procession on Holy Thursday. Bella sat on Eddie's shoulders the whole time and was completely silent, which is not a state Bella often achieves. Don Luis had told her in advance that this was the week we visit our friends who can't visit us, and she had taken that in entirely literally and was, I think, looking for them in the crowd.

Year two: a Boulder visit

Last April we went down to Boulder instead. Eddie and I had not really been back since the SMA move in 2020, and Bella had no memory of it at all. We stayed with friends near Pearl Street, ate at a restaurant Eddie used to manage in his late twenties (the chef remembered him; Bella was deeply impressed), and walked the Boulder Creek Path where I used to push a stroller before SMA. Bella, who has only ever lived in Mexican colonial architecture and Colorado mountain-town wood-and-stone, was absolutely flummoxed by the bustle of the Pearl Street pedestrian mall on a Saturday. "Por qué todos están caminando?" she asked, in Spanish, in the middle of the mall.

Year three (this April): the SMA / Holy Week alignment again

We're going back. The breaks line up. Don Luis is expecting us. Bella has been planning what to wear to the procession for three weeks, which is three more weeks than she has spent planning her own birthday outfit.

Mountain town in spring with melting snow Colorado — Our home street the day we left for break. Half snow, half mud, all reason to leave.

The logistics, briefly

If you're considering using a shoulder-season week (whether your district calls it mud season, intersession, or a stretch of PD days):

Book early but watch closures. Mexican shoulder season is a great deal but some smaller hotels do close for a week or two in April. Confirm directly.
Holy Week vs. the week after. Holy Week itself is loud and beautiful and crowded. The week after is the quieter family-travel week within Mexico — also great, less iconic.
Tell your teacher early. If your district doesn't have an official break and you're constructing one, the conversation matters more. (Separate post on that coming.)
Pad the return. Always come back a day before school resumes. Mud season has a way of making you tired in ways that warm sun doesn't fix.

I have started to believe that shoulder-season family travel is a small act of resistance against peak-season pricing and peak-season crowds and the assumption that travel has to happen during the loud weeks of the year.

Mud season in our town is grey and wet and, honestly, a little sad. The light is flat. The mountain looks like it's recovering from something. Eddie says it's the only time of year he doesn't love living here, which from him is a strong statement. So we leave. We have decided, as a family, that this is the week we go visit our other home, or our old home, or some city where the sun has remembered how to behave. Bella is six and she already understands that April is the month we travel. She has built it into her sense of how a year works. I think that's good. I think that's exactly what I would have wanted as a kid, and I am surprised, sometimes, that we ended up in a position to give it to her.