RUNNING SPRINGS, Calif. (AP) — Jennifer Cobb and her husband planned to stay four days at their vacation home in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. But that dragged on for a week as they were trapped in a relentless series of storms that piled snow so high they could barely see out of the windows.

As they try to dig out, it snows again. They are considering walking to the main road to see if they can hitchhike off the mountain to get to their teenage daughter and elderly father, Cobb, in San Diego County.

“We hear the ghostly sounds of plows, but they are never heard,” Cobb, 49, said. “Staying here, in this wonderful place, shouldn’t be terrible, but it is.”

Cobb and other besieged Californians braved another storm Tuesday as blizzard warnings blanketed the Sierra Nevada range in the northern half of the state, more snow was on the way for southern mountains like the San Bernardino Range, and forecasters warned , that any journeys are dangerous.

On the eastern flank of the Sierra, the Mona County Sheriff’s Office bluntly tweeted: “Roads closed. All of them. There is no alternate route, back way, or secret route. A blizzard, people.”

San Bernardino County declared a state of emergency, with mountain residents trapped in their homes and motorists stranded. More snow was expected in many localities, where residents, unable to drive through deep snow on roads that were closed anyway, mostly moved on foot.

The latest storm in California was one of two to sweep the country, with snow closing or delaying the opening of hundreds of schools in the Northeast, which saw the heaviest snowfall of the mild winter on Tuesday.

And Michigan was battling ice again after Monday’s storm left thousands of customers without power in the central part of the state. To the southeast, around Detroit, some customers still lacked power on the sixth day after the previous storm.

The storms delayed travel, closed schools and overwhelmed crews trying to shovel snow and repair downed power lines. Nationwide, about 500 commercial flights were canceled and more than 3,000 delayed as of Tuesday afternoon, according to FlightAware.com.

The weather is expected to persist in the West through Wednesday, with winter storm warnings extending from the Oregon coast to many of Southern California’s already snow-covered mountains.

In the San Bernardino mountain community of Running Springs, the town is blanketed in snow, with several mounds over six feet (1.8 meters) high. Some residents went to the grocery store to stock up on groceries and carried the bags on plastic sleds.

In nearby Crestline, Michael Johnston said his family’s grocery store was running out of basic supplies, even though they had stocked up before the storm. Authorities are escorting two full grocery trucks to the mountain community, Johnston said — just in time for another storm that will add a foot of snow.

“We have completely run out of bread. The milk becomes very light. “We’re almost completely out of produce,” said Johnston of Goodwin and Sons Market. “Beer—domestic beer—very, very cheap.”

Johnston said many of the store’s employees can’t get to work, so he uses a plow truck to get them to and from work during limited hours. Most customers come on foot.

Among them is 60-year-old Christian Vincenzo. He reached Goodwin’s on foot, but there was no bread on the shelves and a minimum of groceries. However, he was lucky to be close enough to get there in 15 minutes by foot.

“People have posted online about running out of groceries because they live in an area of ​​town where it’s too far to walk to a grocery store,” he said. “We didn’t have any snow plows… It’s going to be a while before we can all get out.”

For California skiers and snowboarders, the parade of storms was just too good. Most resorts around Lake Tahoe were closed Tuesday. Big Bear Mountain Resort was open, but all roads leading there were closed. The Mount Baldy resort on the huge peak that towers over greater Los Angeles has opened, but was expected to close early.

But California’s Sierra snowpack, which provides about a third of the state’s water supply, continued to benefit from successive dumps of heavy snowfall. Water content in the snowpack on Tuesday — in a state struggling with a multiyear drought — was 186% of normal for the day and 162% of the April 1 average, when it was a historic peak, according to the state Department of Water Resources » Online Data.

In the Northeast, parts of Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island were forecast for heavy snow through Tuesday afternoon. Some areas of western Massachusetts and northern Connecticut received about 7 inches (18 centimeters). The Albany, N.Y., area saw less snow than expected, between 2 and 5 inches, but it was enough to close schools.

Dick Andrew, a Maine snowboarder, said he can’t imagine such a thing as too much snow. The 51-year-old lives in his Sprinter-style van in Sugar Loaf and was snowboarding when it snowed Tuesday.

“We don’t really get too much snow in the winter,” Andrew said. “We want as much as we can get. It’s incredible and gives purpose to the cold weather.”
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Taksin reported from Orange County, California, and Pratt from suburban Boston. Associated Press reporters Ben Finley in Virginia, David Sharp in Maine, Dave Collins in Connecticut, Julie Walker in New York and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this report, as well as other AP reporters around the country.