The upper flanks of Camels Hump in winter are among the most beautiful places I have ever been. An azure sky traces a hard edge around gnarly, dark branches and the peach skin of paper birches. Tendrils of paper birch bark flutter in the breeze like tiny prayer flags. Beyond these birch groves, balsam fir and spruce forests just below the summit cone are velvety green, inviting and aromatic.

And not only to me.

These high-elevation forests are criss-crossed by runways, what I have come to think of as snowshoe hare highways. Snowshoe hares' goofy, big-footed tracks lead in to these highways from all around, like feeder roads from the suburbs leading to the interstate.

I've always thought these highways a bit strange and something of a figment of my imagination, but it turns out they are entirely real, and have an important role in a hare's life. Snowshoe hares are near the bottom of the food chain. They eat green growing things, and twigs and bark in the winter. Just about every predator out there, from coyotes and bobcats, to owls, foxes and mink, can make a meal out of these critters.

Even people eat hares, and many older natural history books remark on the importance of snowshoe hares to the survival of trappers, homesteaders and Native-Americans. The females, known as does, can have as many as four litters per year of one to eight little furry hares, called leverets. This is one of the main differences between hares and rabbits -- hares are born with fur and can hop almost immediately, and rabbits are born blind and naked.

Hare and rabbit fecundity ensures there are always hares around to eat, but hares have to be smart or quick to survive. That's where these hare highways come in. Snowshoe hares can move at remarkable speeds -- 28 mph, by some accounts – but speed isn't all of it. In the dense thickets they like best, the hares need to know their territory well, and keep their highways clear in the event of a chase. It turns out that the hares actually spend a considerable amount of time clipping vegetation along the trails in the summer to keep them clear. By concentrating on their hare highways in winter, they clear their paths, like plow trucks clearing a road after a winter storm.

If snowshoe hares can't outrun their predators, they have another trick -- camouflage. Snowshoe hares, also called varying hares, are among the few Vermont mammals that turn white in winter. The switch happens when new white fur starts growing in around the legs, ears and face in September, and ends in January when the changeover is complete. In full winter pelage, the hares are entirely white, except for their ear tips and eyelids, which are black. In early March, the process reverses itself and the hare will be 90 percent brown again in less than two months 50 days, to be exact. The white fur drops out in huge clumps in May. In their white coats, still against a new fallen snow, the hares can be invisible.

In spite of their apparent evolutionary success, or perhaps because of it, snowshoe hares struggle to survive in the winter. They feed on buds, twigs, bark, and the evergreen leaves of woody plants. One natural history book says they can clip vegetation that's 18 inches above the ground or snow. When this doesn't suffice, snowshoe hares have a neat, but unsavory, trick: They eat their own feces. Snowshoe hares drop two kinds of feces -- round, brown pellets about the diameter of a raisin, and soft greenish pellets about the same size that they can eat. Hares pass these edible feces during the day, when they're resting. They give hares a second chance to digest the toughest vegetation they eat, sort of like a cow chewing its cud, if you will.

It sounds awful, but it works. Think of them as nature's ultimate recyclers.