© AP
A rare weather event caused spontaneous snowballs to form near the town of Picabo, Idaho.
Thousands of snowballs rolled in a flat central Idaho field look like the work of hundreds of ambitious kids — except there are no human tracks.
A rare weather event caused the spontaneous snowballs at the Nature Conservancy's Silver Creek Preserve and surrounding fields near the tiny town of Picabo.
Preserve manager Sunny Healey spotted the cylindrical shapes up to 18 inches high on Jan. 30 following an overnight windstorm. They created long lines in the snow as they moved.
"You could see the tracks that they made, and I thought that was really curious," Healey said. "I had to stop a couple times. Then, along Highway 20, there were thousands of them."
So-called snow rollers are so rare and fleeting that the precise weather conditions needed to form them are not defined, said Jay Breidenbach, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Snow rollers up to 18 inches are especially rare.
"Those are some pretty big rollers," Breidenbach said. "I've seen some small rollers, but never that big."
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