San Bernadino, CA

March 6, 2023 Updated 6 PM PT

As crews hustled to clear snow-covered roads in the San Bernardino Mountains, many residents remained stranded Monday, frustrated at being cut off for more than 10 days and running low on food and medicine.

The major highways to the mountains were reopened Monday afternoon to residents with proof of residency, the California Highway Patrol announced. They advised residents heading back home to have a contingency plan in case their houses were inaccessible because of the heavy snow.

The San Bernardino Mountains received more than 100 inches of snow over the last several days, stranding an unknown number of people.

State and local agencies were working to clear mounds of snow, using heavy machinery including road graders, front-end loaders, dump trucks, snowplows and snow blowers. Officials from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the Office of Emergency Management, the CHP and the California National Guard were in the mountain communities helping local agencies dig out residents and clear roads, according to a statement from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office.

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Nearly 60 Caltrans employees had removed more than 7.2 million cubic yards of snow from state highways in San Bernardino County as of Saturday, according to the governor’s office. Private contractors removed an additional 970,000 cubic yards from State Routes 18 and 330, the statement added.

Since Sunday, 51 miles of roads have been cleared — defined by the county as one lane cleared with less than 8 inches of snow remaining — out of a total of more than 400 miles that have been serviced. The county estimates that there are nearly 90 miles of road left to be cleared.

The California Department of Transportation is coordinating with local agencies to determine when it will be safe to reopen highways and roads.

California

March 1, 2023

The slow pace of clearing roads has been a source of growing anger in mountain communities. Making matters worse, residents have endured gas leaks, fires and roof cave-ins because of the snow, and authorities have struggled to provide aid.

Volunteer crews have tried to help by dropping supplies by helicopter.

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Private helicopter pilot Micah Muzio left his home in Lake Arrowhead early Friday morning to deliver supplies to mountain communities, taking off from a San Bernardino airport. Flying over communities, he saw the damage caused by the storms, including collapsed roofs.

But when he tried to drive home from the airport Saturday, he was stopped at a checkpoint. Roads were closed, and only emergency vehicles and heavy equipment were allowed to pass, he was told. That was not the case when he left home; locals had been allowed to drive up the highway with an emergency-vehicle escort.

He parked his truck at the checkpoint Saturday and hiked about four miles on Highway 18 to an area where a friend could pick him up and drive him home.

“For me, leaving my wife and daughter alone on the mountain in an emergency was intolerable,” Muzio said Monday.

The CHP stopped the vehicle-escort service because the operation hindered efforts to get resources up the mountain, said Officer Ramon Duran.

March 3, 2023

After being stranded for 11 days in her Lake Arrowhead home, Theresa Grant saw a snowplow roll up the street around 1:30 a.m. Monday and move the remaining 3 to 5 feet of snow blocking the roadway.

Grant had her bags packed, and by 9:30 a.m. she was driving down to Yucaipa to see her mother, who’s in hospice care.

“When I was driving down the mountain this morning, I started tearing up when I saw emergency vehicles coming up the front of the mountain, and I looked down the side of the trucks, and they’re from places I didn’t even know about,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, how far are people coming to help us?’ ”

Grant, who has lived in Lake Arrowhead since the 1990s, had never experienced anything like the recent storms.

“We know that this is not normal,” she said. “If we get 2 feet of snow, that’s a huge storm for us at our elevation. To have an event of this magnitude happen, there’s only so much preparation you can do.”

Grant said she and her husband were among the “lucky ones” with running water, power and food to last through the week. After the couple ran out of fresh produce, a friend who lives near a road that had been plowed offered to get them groceries. The two hiked through snow 4 feet deep to pick up the produce, as well as eggs and dog food.

Grant knew of elderly and critical-care patients who weren’t able to get out of their homes or obtain necessary medications and treatment.

“It’s people like that that I look at, and these were the people who needed to be addressed first,” she said. “Those of us who are able-bodied, we could hike out, we could shovel, we could do something. The elderly or those on oxygen without supplies, they cannot shovel themselves out. They literally could not get out, and that just breaks my heart.”

California

March 4, 2023

Maria Tapia, who owns the cafe Tapia’s Red Cabin in Running Springs, said her daughter and granddaughter were stuck at the bottom of the mountain after driving down to get medication. They were stopped behind the roadblock and didn’t know when they would get home, she said.

“She’s been staying in hotels for the last three days. CHP stopped her and told her to go back,” Tapia said. “She needed to go down because her daughter needed insulin.”

Last week, Tapia was worried about locals who were stranded in their homes.

“The snow got so bad that it got to the doors. People were coming out of their windows,” she said. “A lot of people are in need.”

She and her husband make the 30-minute walk to open their cafe every day, because she doesn’t know what else to do for the community.

“I am grateful forever. We make the sacrifice every day to be here,” Tapia said. “But God is good. God is bringing people here.”

SAN BERNARDINO — Stretching across more than 20,000 square miles, from the edge of the sprawling Los Angeles metropolis in the west to California’s desert border with Nevada and Arizona in the east, San Bernardino County is by far the largest county in the lower 48 states.

It’s bigger in area than nine states, as well as Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium and dozens of other countries, as advocates of a recent push for county secession often point out. You can see on any map of the 58 counties of California that San Bernardino dwarfs all others.

The reason for its vast size? A Mormon settlement that took root in Southern California almost two centuries ago.

In 1851, Brigham Young, the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the governor of the Utah Territory — it wasn’t yet a state — dispatched an envoy to Southern California to plant a Mormon colony that he hoped would expand the church’s influence, gain converts and chart a snow-free wagon route to transport goods from the Pacific Coast.

According to the historian Edward Leo Lyman, 437 Latter-day Saints, traveling in 150 covered wagons, made the treacherous 600-mile journey from central Utah to Southern California through the rocky Cajon Pass, “undoubtedly one of the most arduous pioneer treks in American history.” (An imposing sandstone outcropping in the pass named the Mormon Rocks honors their voyage, though, of course, Native tribes lived near these rocks for hundreds of years before Spanish or Anglo settlers arrived.)

Upon arriving in California, the Mormon travelers bought a 35,000-acre plot of land known as Rancho San Bernardino from the Lugo brothers, part of a prominent Los Angeles family, said Nathan Gonzales, who teaches history at the University of Redlands. They began to grow their settlement, building houses, devising a street grid and planting fruit trees and vineyards.

At the time, the height of the gold rush, San Francisco was the political center of California — which had just joined the union in 1850 — and the southern half of the state was still referred to as “the cow counties” because of all the undeveloped land, Gonzales told me. The newly formed San Bernardino, about 60 miles east of the city of Los Angeles, fell within the boundaries of Los Angeles County and within a year became its second biggest city.

That gave the Mormon community political power in the region. In 1852, Jefferson Hunt, a well-known Mormon settler, was elected to the California State Assembly — and at the top of his agenda was creating San Bernardino County.

Hunt wanted his new territory to be wide enough to incorporate not just the growing Mormon settlement but also all existing and potential future routes from Southern California to Salt Lake City, which was a goal of Young’s, according to the historian Tom Sutak.

In April 1853, California lawmakers approved Hunt’s proposal to carve out an eastern swath of Los Angeles County to form San Bernardino County.

The county’s trapezoidal boundaries shifted slightly over the next few decades, and a slice was removed to create neighboring Riverside County in 1893. But San Bernardino County has remained California’s biggest county, encompassing much of the Mojave Desert and some of Joshua Tree National Park, with its northeast corner roughly 50 miles from Las Vegas and its southwest 50 miles from the Pacific Ocean.

In downtown San Bernardino, at the palm-tree-lined entrance to a towering county courthouse, a green sign marks the site of the Mormon Stockade, the first place that the Mormon colonists lived when they arrived in California. A 30-minute drive northwest, through a harsh landscape that looks like the set of an old Western, barren but for a few ranch houses and yuccas, I recently spotted the Mormon Trail Monument, an old wooden wheel that points to the nearby mountains, where the pioneers entered — and eventually departed — the San Bernardino Valley.

As the California colony expanded, Young became increasingly concerned that its residents were straying too far from the church, and that some had perhaps become disillusioned with some of its practices, including polygamy. (Hunt, the state assemblyman known as the “Father of San Bernardino County,” had two wives and is believed to have had the most children — 21, as well as 154 grandchildren — of any state legislator in California history, said Jackie Peterson, a California State Library spokesperson.)

In 1857, just six years after his followers arrived, Young recalled the San Bernardino settlers to Utah. His suspicions were at least partially confirmed, according to Lyman, the historian: Of the roughly 3,000 people living in the California settlement at the time, only about half went back to Salt Lake. The rest stayed in San Bernardino.

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Where we’re traveling

Today’s tip comes from Patrice Smerdu:

“The city of Carlsbad is well worth a visit. The old downtown has great restaurants and boutique shops, and Legoland is close by. This time of year, the Flower Fields are a wonderful place to visit and are open until Mother’s Day with almost 50 acres of flowers and other activities.”

Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We’ll be sharing more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.

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What foods do you consider quintessentially Californian? Sourdough bread? Wine? Oranges? California burritos?

Tell us your favorite Golden State dish, drink or snack, and include a few sentences about what it means to you. Email us at CAToday@nytimes.com.

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And before you go, some good news

Jay Tracy, an itinerant teacher of the deaf, lives in the Bay Area with his wife and four children — and an extra refrigerator stuffed with pounds of heirloom cucumber seed.

This seed stash represents the product of a yearslong treasure hunt.

In 2009, Tracy, who was living in Tucson, Ariz., at the time, wanted to identify which types of cucumber might perform best in hot and dry environments. He’s since become a foster parent to more than 50 cucumber varieties, many of which look nothing like what you would see in a grocery store.

He’s particularly interested in cucumber melons, which are genetically closer to a cantaloupe or honeydew than a cucumber. Their perk? “They are never bitter,” he said, “and always easy on the digestion.”

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back on Monday. Enjoy your weekend. — Soumya

Briana Scalia and Isabella Grullón Paz contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at CAtoday@nytimes.com.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Jefferson Hunt’s proposal to create San Bernardino County was approved in April 1953. It was approved in April 1853.

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Cases of West Nile virus were confirmed in San Bernardino County on Tuesday as authorities are warning the public to be cautious.

The infections mark the first locally acquired human cases of West Nile virus in the county this year and have been confirmed in Rialto and San Bernardino, according to the Department of Public Health.

West Nile virus is transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected mosquito.

While many people infected with the virus may have no symptoms, older individuals and those with existing health issues are most likely to develop severe symptoms.

“West Nile virus can cause a serious illness in humans,” said San Bernardino County Health Officer Michael A. Sequeira. “Therefore, I urge residents to take precautions to protect themselves against mosquito bites.”

Those most susceptible to complications from infection include anyone over 50 years old, people with diabetes, cancer, hypertension, kidney disease, those who are immunocompromised, organ transplant recipients, or anyone with a recent history of chemotherapy.

About 1 in 5 infected people will develop a fever with other symptoms such as headache, body aches, joint pains, vomiting, diarrhea, or rash, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although most people can recover, feeling tired and general weakness can last for weeks or months.

Signs and symptoms may include:

– Fever, body aches, rash, nausea, vomiting, and headache.– Symptoms of severe illness include high fever, headache, neck stiffness, stupor, disorientation, coma, tremors, convulsions, muscle weakness, vision loss, numbness, and paralysis.– Recovery from severe illness might take several weeks or months. Some effects on the central nervous system might be permanent.– About 1 out of 10 people who develop severe illness affecting the central nervous system die.

“The risk of infection from West Nile virus typically increases from summer through early fall,” county officials said. “Residents are encouraged to protect themselves from mosquito bites during outdoor activities, especially at dawn and dusk.”

Since there is no human vaccine for West Nile virus, residents are urged to be proactive against mosquito bites by wearing insect repellent. Anyone who experiences a sudden high fever (above 102°F), severe headache, or a stiff neck, should seek medical help right away.

Residents can protect themselves from mosquito bites by taking these precautions:

– Wear shoes, socks, long pants, and long-sleeved shirts that are loose-fitting and light-colored.-Remove or drain all standing water around your property where mosquitoes lay eggs, including birdbaths, ponds, old tires, buckets, clogged gutters, and puddles from leaky sprinklers.– Make sure doors and windows have tight-fitting screens. Repair or replace screens that have tears or holes to prevent mosquitoes from entering the home.– Use insect repellent that has ingredients approved by the EPA such as DEET, IR 3535, and Oil of Lemon Eucalyptus.– Report green or neglected pools by calling the San Bernardino County Mosquito and Vector Control Program at 800-442-2283. Press 3 when prompted.

For more information on West Nile virus, to report a standing water source, or to request a courtesy mosquito inspection, visit the San Bernardino County Mosquito and Vector Control Program’s website or call 800-442-2283.

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A wildfire burning in the San Bernardino National Forest grew quickly past 100 acres Wednesday afternoon, fire officials said.

The Nob fire, the first large wildfire of the season in California, started shortly after 10 a.m. Wednesday and had spread to 200 acres as of Thursday morning, according to the U.S. Forest Service. It was 5% contained.

Because of its location deep in the forest, between Wrightwood and Lytle Creek, the fire is not a threat to any surrounding communities, said Eric Sherwin, a spokesperson for the San Bernardino County Fire Department.

The blaze is the first major wildfire in California this year after an exceptionally wet winter that left state officials more concerned about flooding than fires — a reversal from recent years.

By this time in 2022 — the third year of a punishing drought — firefighters across the state had already battled more than a dozen major wildfires, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and federal fire data, which track incidents that burned at least 10 acres. The first major wildfire last year occurred in January, exceptionally early even as researchers say the state’s fire season will continue to lengthen with climate change.

About 150 personnel from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and the San Bernardino County Fire Department were battling the blaze, said Gus Bahena, a spokesperson for the San Bernardino National Forest.

By about 2 p.m., the fire was spreading at a slow to moderate rate and burning west toward the snowpack, which should help calm the flames, Bahena said.

Although the Nob fire is the first of the year, Sherwin said, its timing was not atypical.

“This is pretty common for us in this part of the year,” he said. “We will get big grass fires that run hundreds of acres … and then they burn out.

“Fingers crossed, theoretically, that’s what happens [today],” Sherwin said. He said at this time in the season, and particularly this year, the larger brush is still pretty saturated, which makes these early-season fires typically easier to manage.

The cause of the fire is under investigation, said Bahena, adding that reports that the fire grew out of a controlled burn were false.

The Rancho Cucamonga Fire District issued a smoke advisory Wednesday, explaining smoke seen in the city was likely from the Nob fire.

The wildfire broke out as a heat wave swept across the state, expected to bring some of the warmest temperatures this year by the weekend. Sherwin said high temperatures could increase fire intensity but pointed out that the high levels of moisture in the ground — as well as the still-strong snowpack — will help balance concerns about the heat.