Saturday's Rallye Perce-Neige is the first event in the 2012 Canadian national championship. The event is based in Maniwaki, Quebec, a resort area about an hour north of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada's capitol city.

Perce-Neige is obviously a winter snow rally being in early February. But apparently that hyphen is pretty important for the event's identity.

According to Wikipedia Perce-Neige is a flower: "Snowdrop is a common name ambiguous in French designating various plants of the family Amaryllidaceae that grow and bloom usually in winter. They have to do this, the ability to pierce a thin layer of snow."

Piercing the snow is an important identity. This is a snow rally, after all!

Several of the teams in this event also ran at Sno*Drift, America's season opening rally, last weekend. Early returns, however, say Perce-Neige and its snow will be a little easier on the teams. Snow, evidently, is easier to navigate than the glare ice that greeted them at Sno*Drift outside Atlanta and Lewiston, Michigan.

But back to Perce-Neige.

If you forget the hyphen - becoming Perceneige - you'll be identifying a commune in the Yonne department in Burgundy in north-central France. There'll be common hazards at Saturday's Rallye Perce-Neige but I don't think the teams will share solutions. And isn't that a common issue in a commune?

More to the point, though, is the spelling within the Canadian Rally Championship. The website that governs the Rallye doesn't include the hyphen. The event site itself uses the hyphen in some spots and doesn't in others. Curious.

Perce-Neige is a good identity for the rally because 40 teams will be fighting their way through snow in one of the longest events in North America (244 kilometers or nearly 152 miles). It'll last more than 12 hours on Saturday.

Makes you wonder, though. Any flower strong enough to fight its way through snow you've got to respect.

More Rallye Perce-Neige news and updates: http://bit.ly/vZX6N2