Kimberly Stolar was glad to be off the roads in Erie, Pa., on Saturday. Not that she had much choice: She couldn’t open her front door, no matter how hard she pushed against an estimated 50 inches of snow that had drifted over. She knew her S.U.V. was somewhere in her driveway, but she couldn’t tell exactly where.
“I’m just trying today to ignore the fact that I can’t get out of my house, and just be thankful for what I have in my house,” said Ms. Stolar, 33, an Erie native who said this storm was the worst that she could recall.
More than two feet of snow blanketed western New York and Pennsylvania on Saturday, with some parts getting more than three feet, as a lake-effect snowstorm disrupted post-Thanksgiving travel and stranded dozens of vehicles on highways. The storm threatened to bring up to six feet of snow to some areas by Tuesday morning.
The snowfall was heaviest along Interstate 90, the National Weather Service said, which hugs Lake Erie from Buffalo through Pennsylvania and on to Cleveland. Erie and parts of northern Michigan, eastern Ohio and western New York received around 30 inches of snow or more, the service said Saturday. National Guard troops were dispatched in New York and Pennsylvania.
Some of the most dramatic scenes of the storm were out of Erie. Its normally lively downtown was deserted, as fast-falling snow trapped residents inside their homes. Motorists barred from Interstate 90 wound up stranded on two-lane highways, and truck owners towed cars out of ditches. Temporary shelters were set up for travelers who were stuck, where a few hundred people took refuge, according to Brenton Davis, the executive of Erie County, Pa.
Kevin Ricart, 33, who was visiting family in Erie from Chicago, had hoped to take his wife and their 2-year-old son to the Experience Children’s Museum downtown. But their plans were quickly derailed.
“Peach Street was a horror show,” Mr. Ricart said, referring to the city’s busy commercial corridor that stretches from downtown to a mall. “It was backed up as far as we could see, and a semi was stuck diagonally in the road. We just said ‘never mind’ and turned around.”
The heavy snowfall was a lake-effect storm, caused by cold air pushing over the relatively warm waters of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, said Mitchell Gaines, lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Binghamton, N.Y. The storms pick up moisture over the lakes and then dump it when they hit colder land, typically engulfing relatively small areas with huge amounts of snow.
Irina Miller, 38, was among the travelers who were stuck on the highway for hours on Friday night. She was on her way to Columbus, Ohio, after spending Thanksgiving in Buffalo with her husband and 19-month-old daughter when traffic came to a stop near the Pennsylvania border.
On Friday night, Ms. Miller said, “We’ve kind of accepted that we are stranded and we don’t know what’s happening.” She said on Saturday that she was in the clear after 2 a.m., and she finally reached home in the afternoon, about 24 hours after leaving Buffalo.
According to AAA, the automobile organization, nearly 80 million people were expected to travel for Thanksgiving this year. About three million people in the United States were expected to travel by air on Sunday.
Towns across western New York were bracing for more snow, as Gov. Kathy Hochul, who declared a state of emergency on Friday in nearly a dozen counties, warned that the worst was yet to come in the state. The most significant snowfall in western New York was expected to arrive Saturday and last into Sunday.
Parts of Buffalo could receive up to 20 inches of snow through Sunday, when the Bills host the San Francisco 49ers in nearby Orchard Park, N.Y. On Saturday, the storm prevented the delivery of the city’s daily paper, The Buffalo News, because of road closures and restrictions on commercial truck driving.
But not everyone was too concerned about the storm. Robert Warner, the manager of Cole’s, an Irish pub and restaurant in Buffalo, expected a snowy evening to be good for business.
“They bring people in, and then they don’t want to leave because they don’t want to go back outside,” he said of snowstorms.
“We’re getting, what, 10 inches? That’s not even going to faze us,” he added. “This is nothing.”
For at least one family, the snow even served as a tourist attraction. Donn Lentz, 43, made a spur-of-the-moment, two-hour drive from Beaver County, Pa., to Erie with his wife and two sons, 5 and 10, after hearing about the lake-effect snowstorm.
The family went sledding on Friday, and they were planning to go fishing for perch on Lake Erie on Saturday.
“The kids think it’s pretty wild,” Mr. Lentz said. “It’ll definitely be a memory for them.”
Arctic air is expected to bring the coldest temperatures since mid-February to parts of the northern Great Plains into next week, the National Weather Service aid, with some areas of North Dakota recording wind chills of negative 40 degrees. Subfreezing temperatures were also expected early Sunday in southern Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle.
And a winter weather advisory was in effect across West Virginia; northern Kentucky; southern Illinois and Indiana; Missouri; and eastern Kansas, with a few inches of snow and slippery road conditions in the forecast.
In Erie, the downtown area was eerily quiet on what should have been one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year. Stephanie Hunt, the owner of Copper Carriage, an antiques and home décor shop, was heartbroken at the postponement of a highly anticipated event featuring local vendors, restaurants and museums.
Ms. Hunt had looked forward to welcoming customers to her cheerfully decorated shop. Instead, she spent the day at her downtown home, where neighbors came together to check on one another and coordinate grocery runs.
“It is pretty,” she said of the snow. “But it can be pretty at four inches, not four feet.”
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