Jan. 27—An intense bout of snow and dropping temperatures led to slick roads around Anchorage Monday after several weeks of unseasonably warm weather.

The Anchorage School District has canceled all after-school sports, activities and community rentals due to "worsening road conditions," officials said in an announcement before noon.

Prolonged wet, windy weather had saturated Southcentral Alaska through the weekend, leaving a trail of potholes, high water and avalanches.

Now the cold is muscling its way back in. In other words: False spring breakup is over. Second winter is here.

Temperatures began dropping toward January norms Monday morning, and snow returned to Anchorage and Mat-Su.

Slick conditions were reported on the Glenn Highway and in the city. Two sections of Elmore Road were closed briefly Monday morning after trucks blocked traffic due to icy conditions, according to an Anchorage police spokesman.

Citing hazardous weather conditions and lingering power outages, Mat-Su district officials closed schools in the Susitna Valley on Monday.

Road crews were contending with "extremely slick" conditions around the region after 2 1/2 days of high wind and heavy rain followed by Monday's temperature drop and coating of snow, said Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities spokesperson Shannon McCarthy.

"Crews worked all weekend with thaw trucks and pot hole patching to keep roads drivable and had to switch back over to sanders in record time," McCarthy said.

The forecast is calling for potentially subzero temperatures Wednesday night into Thursday morning, replacing the past few weeks of unusually balmy readings.

Warmth, a major windstorm and rain eroded the official snowpack from 8 inches around the December holidays to nothing at all by Sunday.

"It went to zero for maybe 12 hours there," said Anchorage-based National Weather Service meteorologist Tracen Knopp. "With this snow band that came over us this morning — they're actually out there measuring it right now, but we got I would estimate maybe a quarter inch of snow."

Several inches of snow was reported in other parts of the city, he said.

Until the latest storm system arrived, a series of atmospheric rivers deluged the region, melting most accumulation at lower elevations and coating the mountains with heavy, wet snow that triggered a number of large avalanches.

At Alyeska Resort in Girdwood, a cornice on a ridge above Glacier Bowl gave way Sunday afternoon, sending a massive slide all the way down to the Main Street run, according to Duane Stutzman, Alyeska's mountain general manager.

There were no reports of anyone caught in the slide, Stutzman said Monday morning, adding crews plan to do one more search of the debris pile, then spend the day on avalanche mitigation and regrooming the debris path.

"We had only one guest up there. He happened to be the reporting party. Talk about luck," he said.

The other lucky element of a non-injury avalanche within the boundaries of a ski area: "It brought down a lot of good snow that we can displace into the right areas," Stutzman said.

A large slide shut down traffic on the Parks Highway on and off since Friday, when an avalanche blocked both lanes of traffic north of Cantwell.

The highway was closed again Sunday evening but reopened Monday with pilot car operations in place to escort the public through the area, according to the state's 511 highway information site.

Hatcher Pass Road in the Talkeetna Mountains near Palmer remains closed due to avalanches and avalanche danger just past Skeetawk Ski Area until at least Tuesday, according to the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.

Days of unseasonal rain cratered roads around the region with tire-blowing potholes. The Alaska Zoo reported bears Oreo and Izzy lumbered out of their dens at least briefly over the weekend.

The National Weather Service registered a high of 46 degrees at its offices near Anchorage's airport on Sunday, tying a record set in 2014.

The most recent storm came on the heels of historic winds and warmth that battered Anchorage and the region this month, leaving some without power for days.

By last week, parts of the Deep South, including Mississippi and Louisiana, saw more snow on the ground than Anchorage's diminished pack could muster.

[Hey, New Orleans, please send some of your snow to Anchorage]

A new weather system bringing cold air is pushing the warmer, moist air to the east, Knopp said Monday.

"A low-pressure system with an Arctic air mass is wrapping around this low-pressure system and bringing cold air over Southcentral Alaska," he said. "Cooler air is flowing in, and we'll just see a gradual temperature change over the next few days."