AVERY COUNTY, N.C. — The race was on in Avery County this weekend. The Woolly Worm Festival was back for its 45th year. People headed in to race their worms up string.

What You Need To Know

The Woolly Worm Festival was back in Avery County this weekend

Students practiced racing in school to get ready for the big event

The woolly worm is said to predict the high country's winter weather

It's a festival known countrywide, but locals also take time to prepare for the race. Students from Riverside Elementary School spent their day practicing Thursday. Their worms raced up the string for a chance to be the winner of the school. It's a tradition that has been going on there for years.

This year's winner at Riverside Elementary was Kenzie Goforth. Goforth is in fourth grade and says she practiced racing her worm at home to get ready for the big day.

"I blowed on it real hard," Goforth said.

She was hoping her worm won, because her worm didn't have too much black. Black on a woolly worm means snow. It's an old celebrated folklore in the mountains that turned into a festival here in the 1970s when Jim Mortan was preparing a winter issue of a magazine and found the woolly worms.

As the folklore goes, there are 13 body segments on a woolly worm and 13 weeks of winter. Each stripe representing the weather that week. The worm that gets up the string fastest predicts the winter season based on its colors. 

If a worm has black strips, that means snow. Brown means average temperatures. Flick, a name meant to represent both brown and black, means below average with some snow. 

"It's a very big deal for Avery County," Riverside Elementary Principal Whitney Baird Vance said.

Vance says the festival is not only a large fundraiser tool for the school district and brings in more than 20,000 people, but a big economic booster for the community.

"It is beautiful where we are. It just brings people in from the outside and shows them what our culture is around here," Vance said.