On the approach to Lushan, some residents stood with cardboard signs asking for water.
Some villages close to the epicentre in Lushan and Baoxing counties were left in ruins.
That changed beginning with the town of Tianquan, just southwest of Lushan and typically about a half-hour drive away.
Roads closer to Lushan were clear, apparently to make room for emergency vehicles.
"Look at the condition of my house, " said Lin Feng, a 45-year-old Lushan resident, pointing to her heavily damaged home.
In Lushan, the local middle school appeared to be little damaged and rescue workers were using it as a makeshift hospital.
The official Xinhua News Agency said the well-known Bifengxia panda preserve, which is near Lushan, was not affected by the quake.
Even in the more accessible areas of neighbouring Lushan county, the aid effort has been hampered by road congestion, our correspondent adds.
Villages close to the epicentre in Lushan county were left in ruins.
Global Times says continual aftershocks, severe road congestion and insufficient relief supplies are also hampering the rescue efforts in Lushan and neighbouring counties.
Lushan, where the quake struck, is home to 1.5 million people where the fertile Sichuan plain meets foothills that eventually rise to the Tibetan plateau.
Social media users who said they were in Lushan county posted photos of collapsed buildings and reported that water and electricity had been cut off.
Power and water supplies have been knocked out in Lushan county.
Lushan, where the quake struck, lies where the fertile Sichuan plain meets foothills that eventually rise to the Tibetan plateau and sits atop the Longmenshan fault.
Houses collapsed and roads buckled when the quake hit, with much of the intensity concentrated in Lushan, a county just southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu.
"I dare not go anywhere near a mountainside, " a woman named Zhu was quoted by Agence-France Presse news agency, in the village of Baoxing, centre of Lushan county, as saying.
In the town of Lushan, seat of the county government, the damage was less widespread, and streets were filled with excavators and vehicles carrying paramilitary police to help with the rescue efforts.
The roads in the city of Yingjing, on the way to Lushan from Chengdu, were packed with heavy equipment brought in by military and rescue workers, but police were restricting much of the travel.
Xiong Gang, a government worker in Lushan county, said that when the quake struck he was sleeping in his sixth-floor apartment with his wife and child, and he immediately hid them in the bathroom.
The quake caused houses to collapse along a street in Ya'an and sent rocks tumbling into vehicles, Xinhua said, adding that patients were being treated on the ground in front of the Lushan County Hospital.
"The public can of course continue to express scepticism, but we cannot because give up helping compatriots in earthquake-stricken areas of Lushan because of distrust of an organisation, " Beijing Youth Daily commentator Shu Shengxiang adds.
"The biggest problem is that the worst-hit spots are spread out in the mountains and it is very hard for rescuers to get the injured people out, " said Zhou Shaohua, chief surgeon at the People's Hospital of Lushan.
The earthquake Saturday morning triggered landslides that cut off roads and disrupted phone and power connections in mountainous Lushan county, in Sichuan's Ya'an city area, which is further south on the same fault line where a devastating quake wreaked widespread damage across the region five years ago.
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