Pierre, S.D. — The worst of the winter storm, which shut down interstates from Arizona to Wyoming on Wednesday, left thousands without power, and prompted Southern California's first blizzard warning in decades, won't be over for several days.

Few locations, including some at the opposite extreme, escaped the wild weather; long-standing record high temperatures were broken in cities in the Midwest, mid-Atlantic, and Southeast.

The wintry mix struck hard in the northern United States, closing down businesses like offices and schools as well as the Minnesota Legislature. Travel was challenging. According to the tracking service FlightAware, weather was a factor in the cancellation of more than 1,600 flights in the United States. At the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, more than 400 of those were scheduled to arrive or depart. Over 5,000 additional flights were delayed across the nation.

Taylor Dotson, her husband Reggie, and their 4-year-old daughter Raegan experienced a two-hour flight delay to Nashville on their way back to Belvidere, Tennessee, at Denver International Airport.

Reggie Dotson traveled to Denver for a job interview with an airline.

The roads were equally terrible. According to Sgt. Jeremy Beck of the Wyoming Highway Patrol, rescuers found it "near-impossible" to reach people trapped in cars in Wyoming due to strong winds and drifting snow.

The Wyoming Transportation Department announced via social media that many of the state's southern roads were impassable. Search teams in the Pacific Northwest were unable to locate the bodies of three climbers who died in an avalanche on Washington's Colchuck Peak over the weekend due to strong winds and deep snow in the Cascade Mountains.

Two specialists from the Northwest Avalanche Center hiked to the area on Wednesday to assess whether the terrain might allow for a later this week.

According to PowerOutage.us, by Wednesday night, more than 65,000 customers in the state were without electricity.

According to KTVU, a redwood fell onto a house in Boulder Creek, a neighborhood in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco, critically injuring a 1-year-old child.

Los Angeles, Ventura, and Santa Barbara counties' mountains are under a blizzard warning for the first time since 1989, which is in effect from Thursday at 4 a.m. to Saturday at 4 p.m., according to the National Weather Service.

Due to snow, rain, and wind gusts of up to 80 mph, a more than 200-mile (320-kilometre) stretch of Interstate 40 between central Arizona and the New Mexico border was closed (129 kph). In Arizona, there were more than 8,000 customers without electricity.

The National Weather Service warned on Wednesday night that some areas of Minnesota and Wisconsin could receive more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) of snow.

The largest snowfall recorded in the Twin Cities was 28.4 inches (72 centimeters), which fell between October 31 and November 3, 1991, according to the weather service. Temperatures could plunge as low as minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 29 degrees Celsius) on Thursday and to minus 25 F (minus 32 C) on Friday in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Wind chills may fall to minus 50 F (minus 46 C), said Nathan Rick, a meteorologist in Grand Forks.

The weather service warned that wind gusts in western and central Minnesota could reach 50 mph (80 kph), causing "significant blowing and drifting snow with whiteout conditions in open areas." According to WZZM-TV, the weather even forced about 90 churches in western Michigan to postpone Ash Wednesday services.

A half-inch (1.3 centimeters) or more of ice is predicted to accumulate in some areas of southern Michigan, northern Illinois, and some eastern states. According to Matt Paul, executive vice president of distribution operations for Detroit-based DTE Electric, nearly 1,500 line workers are prepared to be sent out if the ice causes outages.

He said a half-inch of ice could cause hundreds of thousands of outages. A half-inch of ice covering a wire “is the equivalent of having a baby grand piano on that single span of wire, so the weight is significant,” Paul said.

According to PowerOutage.us, there were more than 192,000 customers without electricity in Michigan on Wednesday evening and almost 89,000 in Illinois.

National Weather Service meteorologist Richard Bann said that some mid-Atlantic and southeastern cities set new high-temperature records by several degrees as the northern U.S. dealt with the winter blast.

In Lexington, Kentucky, the high temperature reached 76 °F (24 °C), breaking the previous record of 70 °F (21 °C), set on February 22, 1913. Nashville, Tennessee, broke the previous record of 1897 by 4 degrees when it reached 78 °F (26 °C). Numerous other locations saw record-high temperatures, including Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Mobile, Alabama.