Full Article Text 

I'm driving to work too fast, late as usual, trying to make up for those last five minutes I spent puttering around my house when I should have gotten out the door. I lean on the accelerator a little and grab my trusty travel mug, lifting it to my lips just as my wheels hit a bumpy, rippled section of the pavement...

There are few things on this pulsing planet that appear less alive, and more adverse to life, than snow. It falls from the sky in sharp-edged crystals. It blankets the earth in white, silent and still. But there's life within some snowflakes, life that begins in the clouds before the snow even falls to earth...

We won't make you guess how many there are, but we want to know what they are and why they all landed on the ground at the same time in late December? (Penny Harris took this shot in Cambridge, Vermont).

Every other week we run a photo of something unusual found in the woods. Guess what it is and you'll be eligible to win a copy of The Outside Story, a paperback collection of our Outside Story newspaper columns. A prize winner will be drawn at random from all the correct entries. The correct answer, and the winner's name, will appear in our next e-newsletter. 

Another strange mark in the snow, which Dicken Crane came across while walking a skid trail.              

 Visit our What In The Woods Is That? contest archive.