An icy wind blows through the quads stirring up powdery snow and settling it back into waist-high drifts. Icicles sparkle in the harsh January sun as they dangle from the rooftops. Piles of dark slush line the streets as cars spin their wheels seeking traction.

This is the Happy Valley students returned to -- or tried to return to -- for the beginning of Spring Semester.

As the Northeast was racked by two powerful storms, dumping a total of 14 inches of snow on State College, meteorologists had little time to hibernate.

"It's certainly been a crazy week," said Jonathan Merritt, an instructor of meteorology and coordinator of the Penn State Weather Station in Walker Building.

The first of the storms -- billed by some forecasters as the "Blizzard of '94" -- was a nor'easter that blew through on Tuesday, blanketing the area under a foot of snow.

Ken Reeves, a senior meteorologist with Accu-Weather, 619 W. College Ave., described a nor'easter as a storm front that moves along the East Coast in a northeasterly direction.

Central Pennsylvania wasn't hit as hard as during the "Blizzard of '93," but this week's measurements for Centre County did range between 12 and 15 inches.

And as if this wasn't enough of a winter wonderland for everyone to dig out, a second storm, this time an Arctic blast sweeping in from the West, drizzled through the Northeast.

The second storm consisted of little more than 2 inches of snow mixed in with freezing rain and sleet, but the results were devastating. "Pennsylvania is getting an ice storm of near epic proportions," Merritt said.

Matt Taron (sophomore-secondary education) said icy conditions made it difficult to get back from his home of Phoenixville in southeast Pennsylvania and put a damper on his semester-break activities.

"We were intending to come back on Friday, but we didn't leave until Saturday," he said. "I didn't get to do much over the last part of the break. I didn't get to leave the house because the weather was so bad."

But on the brighter side, Merritt said the inclement weather should lead to a January thaw.

"We will have some milder weather. When exactly, I can't say for sure," Merritt predicted.

For those who can remember back to the days of trigonometry, Merritt said the atmosphere works like a sine curve.

"Sometimes the wave is progressive and sometimes it gets stuck," Merritt said, adding that the peaks represent warm weather and the valleys are the cold periods. "Guess which one we're in now?" he said.