A snow day with few of the perks: Marylanders spent Monday digging out of a tricky wintry mix of crunchy ice and fluffy powder that complicated the usual revelry. And it may all be for naught: Another storm could be coming.

The Baltimore area registered about 11 inches of combined snow and sleet from Winter Storm Fern, which pummeled states and towns across the country starting late last week. It closed government offices, schools and businesses across Maryland. Plastic shovels were no match.

Meteorologists urged residents to clear snow before it gets even colder. Temperatures were expected to drop Monday night to as low as 7 degrees, with a windchill of 0 degrees to -5 degrees, said Kyle Pallozzi, a meteorologist for the Baltimore/Washington office of the National Weather Service.

“It’ll only get more difficult throughout the week,” Pallozzi said. “Each time it refreezes, it’ll be more like ice, less like snow.”

Vickie Johnson, a Loch Raven resident, heeded that call early Monday. First she had to climb out of her back window after realizing her front and back doors had frozen shut.

“It’s crazy. This was more than I thought it would be,” said Johnson, whose neighbor looked on as she crawled free.

Johnson used an edger, a gardening tool, to slice through the ice that formed around her car, which she normally uses to commute to her job at Eddie’s of Roland Park. She’s not sure when she’ll return to work.

“Icebergs — that’s what we are dealing with,” Johnson said.

Elsewhere in Loch Raven, the Northeast Baltimore neighborhood near the Baltimore County border, residents defied weekend orders from Mayor Brandon Scott and claimed dug-out parking spaces with traffic cones, chairs and other furniture. One spot even sported twin end tables.

Scott made his position on the old Baltimore snow ritual clear on Sunday.

“Don’t do it,” he said on WBAL-TV. “If I see your chair, it’s coming with me and going into the trash.”

Similar scenes unfolded throughout the region as plow trucks and shovelers made progress.

On one snow-encrusted street in Charles Village, 31-year-old Lauren Leffer hoisted a garden hoe high in the air before swinging it down. It pierced through a layer of ice with a thwack!

Leffer picked off the snow that had accumulated around her car; she didn’t know if she’d have to go to work the next morning. A shovel lay temporarily abandoned on the sidewalk nearby.

It was “just too lightweight to actually do the job,” Leffer said. A couple of men who were fixing up a house nearby lent her the heavy-duty gardening tool in an act of neighborly camaraderie.

It felt “powerful” to be excavating her car with such an implement, she said. “It’s fun, you want to try it?”

Leffer, who grew up in the area, said she remembers weathering more frequent heavy snowfalls. Though less than a foot of precipitation fell over the weekend, she said the region seemed underprepared.

“People in the Midwest are probably making fun of us right now,” she said. “But they don’t know what it’s like to not have garages for your cars, tire chains or enough snowplows to go around.”

The snow could take a while to melt.

Pallozzi, the meteorologist, recommended saving some salt in case another storm develops this weekend. Baltimore could see more snow.

Much of the state saw a uniform 8 to 12 inches of total precipitation from Fern, with the southern region experiencing slightly more ice. Original projections called for 5 to 18 inches of snow.

So far 25 deaths have been recorded in the U.S., according to the Associated Press, and 750,000 power outages were reported across the nation. The storm also forced more than 8,000 flight delays and cancelations across the country.

Banner reporters Darreonna Davis, Alissa Zhu, Jasmine Vaughn-Hall and Clara Longo de Freitas contributed to this story.