Snow Tests Patience--and Ingenuity--of Stranded Motorists

Valerie Bates wasn’t going to let a closed road keep her from picking up her 4-year-old daughter from a day-care center in Palmdale. She took a plane home.

Bates, 32, a computer consultant, was working in Sylmar when she learned, like thousands of others Tuesday, that snow had closed off all routes to the Antelope Valley.

“I panicked,” Bates said Wednesday. “I called the school and spoke to my daughter. She was upset. The people at the school said they would take care of her, but all I could think of was getting to her.”

She did--by hopping a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to Palmdale.

It was an unusual route home, but it worked just the same on a frustrating, long and ultimately memorable night when a snowstorm paralyzed most of northern Los Angeles County. Some stranded commuters worried about their children, others their cars. Others fought over motel rooms and bickered over telephone lines.

And on the morning after, scores went to retrieve cars that had been towed off roads and freeways--only to discover they had to pay $65, and sometimes more, to get the cars out of hock.

Others checked out of motels where they had scrambled to find shelter. “What’s really disgusting is when you get up the next morning and you know you have to put the same clothes on,” said Judi Summers, 52, of Palmdale as she checked out of a Canyon Country hotel Wednesday morning. “I have to have clean underwear.”

Sorting out the storm damage Wednesday, the California Highway Patrol said that although there were a multitude of accidents on freeways and mountain roads, there were few involving serious injuries and only one death--that of a Reseda man, possibly driving while intoxicated, who crashed into a snowplow.

Both the Golden State Freeway over the Grapevine and the Antelope Valley Freeway in Agua Dulce were reopened about midnight after being closed shortly after 4 p.m.

The CHP said it was the first time in three years that both critical north county freeway routes were closed at the same time. The added closures of alternate routes, such as Sierra Highway and Bouquet Canyon Road, created a nightmarish traffic snarl that left commuters stranded for hours.

It brought out the best and worst in them.

At the Country Inn in Canyon Country would-be guests crammed the small lobby, eager to make their way to the front counter and guarantee a place for the night at the 50-room motel. Tempers rose.

“At one point the lobby was all filled up with people and they were standing and yelling,” manager Dawn Fischer said. “They literally were saying, ‘Get out of my way or I won’t get a room.’ ”

It took only 45 minutes to fill all the rooms, Fischer said.

Frustration mounted again, she added, when the patrons settled into their rooms and tried to make phone calls to their homes. The motel’s phone lines became overloaded, preventing guests from calling out and angering several, Fischer said.

At the nearby Canyon Country High School gymnasium, the mood was relatively jocular among those who checked into the shelter set up by the American Red Cross. Most of the more than 200 commuters who were gathered at the shelter joked about their trip, exchanged travel war stories. One even asked for a basketball to practice a little shooting.

Machinist Hugh McNair of Lancaster sat quietly with his 8-year-old son, H.R., waiting out the storm. “We were driving on the freeway for about five hours when we heard about the shelter on the radio,” he said. “We just decided to give it up and come here.”

“This is not fun,” H.R. added.

Eric Muhl, 42, of Canyon Country was heading home from his Palmdale job when the storm caught him and forced him to pull over. He crossed the highway and caught a ride from a passing motorist back to Palmdale, where he eagerly called home to report that he was safe.

“I called home to my wife, who didn’t care about me, just what happened to the car,” Muhl said. But Muhl said the red Acura Integra that he bought two months ago for $17,000 looked fine when he found it Wednesday morning at a Palmdale tow yard. The trauma of the experience, however, remained.

“I feel guilty about it, like I abandoned a child or something,” Muhl said.

The heavy snowfall only added to the fun for 44 Westside and San Fernando schoolchildren who were on a day trip to a Wrightwood ski resort. On the way home, their bus skidded off California 2. No one was hurt, but the bus got stuck.

With traffic clogged and no immediate hope for a tow truck, the children did what they do best: They tumbled into the snow, illuminated by the bus’s headlights.

The storm that dumped 0.31 of an inch of rain on the Los Angeles Civic Center on Tuesday and 16 inches of snow on Mt. Wilson moved south Wednesday over Baja California.

In its place came a high-pressure system generating mild Santa Ana winds and clear, sunny skies with a high temperature at the Civic Center of 61 degrees, 10 degrees warmer than Tuesday.

Highs downtown today will push into the low 70s as the Santa Ana condition continues, said Steve Burback, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which prepares forecasts for The Times. The warm weather will continue on Friday, he said.

A new Pacific storm is headed toward California and should arrive Friday, but it will remain in Northern and Central California, Burback said. Southern California should not get any precipitation from that system, he said.

Times staff writers Mike Connelly, John Johnson and David Wharton contributed to this report.