New South Wales has been reminded that winter is here to stay, with snow and flooding hitting the state's west, closing roads and leaving several dozen people stranded.
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Heavy snow blanketed the Jenolan Caves in the central west on Tuesday evening, forcing roads to be closed and leaving sightseers waiting with emergency services.
The State Emergency Service (SES) and NSW Police started receiving calls from motorists about 6pm, with 80 people – including those in tourist buses, public transport and cars – becoming stuck in the snow.
Police remained on the scene for several hours as the council was contacted to bring plows to clear the road.
Eventually, SES volunteers from three nearby units attached chains to their trucks and four-wheel drives and managed to tow the stranded vehicles to safety.
Phil Campbell, a NSW SES spokesman, said everyone was rescued about 10.30pm.
"Everybody has been removed and they're all safe," Mr Campbell said late on Tuesday night.
"We had SES volunteers from Oberon, Lithgow and Portland who were involved, and also the police and Rural Fire Service. All using four-wheel drive vehicles to help pull those vehicles that were bogged out of the snow."
The SES didn't anticipate any further problems from the snow, which was expected to be washed away by Wednesday morning.
Some snow also fell in Oberon and parts of the Blue Mountains.
Further west, flooding and heavy rain closed roads at Condobolin, Narromine and Nyngan, while Sydney also had showers which brought more than 5mm in one hour to parts of the city's east and south-east.
Rebecca Kamitakahara, Duty Forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology, said a "fairly strong" cold front moving across NSW had brought a rain band that dropped the snow and rain, but the weather wouldn't stick around for long.
"We are expecting the rain band to clear out overnight tonight, to clear during tomorrow morning, and following that clearing we'll mostly just return to some coastal showers for the remainder of the week for Sydney," she said.
Snow and rain in the central west was also expected to ease overnight, after moving in at 9am on Tuesday.
"We've seen roughly 20 to 30mm in our rain gauges since 9am," Ms Kamitakahara said. "Obviously not all of that would have fallen as snow, it would have started initially as rainfall then tended to snow as that colder air mass moved across."
