The Big Melt: Crushed houses, trapped cars and the threat of floods – inside California’s buried ski resort
High in the California mountains, a ski resort sits buried under layers of snow and ice. Residents of Mammoth Lakes fear for their lives, and livelihoods, after a winter of record snowfalls.
Wooden houses are blanketed under white powder, cars are buried beneath cement-like drifts, and roads are lined by colossal snow banks stretching up to 50ft tall. Every so often a dagger-like slab of snow or ice will slide from a rooftop and shatter on the ground
They’re used to a lot of snow in Mammoth Lakes. In fact, it’s vital for the economic survival of the town but nobody could have expected what happened this winter.
Residents of Mammoth try to rescue their homes from the huge snowfall
A series of so-called atmospheric rivers – narrow bands of moisture which carry precipitation from the Pacific Ocean over the west coast of the United States – hit California.
These storms have been unusual in their frequency and intensity following a decade of drought, transforming the Golden State into the sodden state.
In Mammoth, the snow fall was three times the historical average. When we visit, a month past the peak, the walls of snow are still as tall as two double decker buses in parts.
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Why is California having such extreme weather?
Steve Searles, known in Mammoth Lakes as the “Bear Whisperer” because of his decades as a wildlife conservationist, has now become a custodian of the community. In his pick-up truck, he is connected to the emergency service radio communications. An alert comes through about part of a house collapsing.
It’s no surprise to Steve.
“This is another one that just went boom,” he says, pointing to the remnants of a house that looks like it exploded but was actually brought down by the sheer weight of the snow.
‘Bear Whisperer’ Steve Searles speaks to Sky News’ Martha Kelner
In his own home, he has dug a path to allow him to open his back door but inside it is dark 24 hours a day because the snow is so tightly packed against the windows. “People here have been living in darkness for months,” he says, “it’s like being squeezed by an anaconda. We kept screaming, ‘help us’ but nobody cut the damn head off.”
But Steve, like everyone here, knows that this is a catastrophe in two parts and the worst is, likely, yet to come.
He points to the snow piled on top of his garage. “This is just over 20,000 gallons of water and that’s only my little roof. There’s nowhere for this water to go when it does start to melt,” he says, “As soon as it goes one or two degrees above freezing at night, then the flooding will begin.”
It is a slow motion disaster and it’s not just the people of Mammoth who are living in fear. The expectation is that once this snow starts to melt, it will send torrents of water gushing downstream.
Houses have been covered in unprecedented snowfall, but the coming melt could devastate the area too
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In California’s central valley, the snow-capped mountains, far in the distance, are a spectre of doom.
The near-record rainfall in California is already transforming the landscape here and that is before the big melt begins.
Corcoran is a town of 25,000 people and home to some of America’s most productive farmland, with an agricultural industry worth $2bn (£1.6bn). It is currently witnessing the remarkable rebirth of Tulare Lake, once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi.
Tulare Lake was drained by farmers before completely disappearing by the mid-part of last century. But it is reappearing with a vengeance, already covering 30 square miles, an area roughly the size of Coventry, it looks like a vast inland sea. Experts predict that over the next couple of months it could grow to 200 square miles.
The flooding here happened too quickly for people to prepare and some workers have returned to the edge of the new lake with rowing boats to try and retrieve their drowned equipment.
California’s high speed rail project swamped by flooding in Tulare County
Jordan Silva is looking for a 40ft long piece of a combine harvester. “This is only from rainwater,” he says, “the snow hasn’t really melted at all. So this is actually kind of nothing right now. It’s going to get way, way worse.”
Beneath the waves are thousands of acres of pistachio trees, alfalfa and wheat fields, including 900 acres belonging to fourth generation farmer Bob Hansen.
On dry land, Bob tells me he is busy devising an evacuation plan for his 20,000 cattle.
“If the temperatures go up and they stay up, we’re done,” Bob says, “We’ve got a historic snowpack and if it were to all come down in a short period of time, the levees won’t hold. There is a very high potential at that point in time that the city of Corcoran goes underwater.”
Bob Hansen is the fourth-generation of farmer in his family – now the weather is putting his livelihood at risk
At the lake’s shoreline, helicopters fly in sandbags and the army, in tractors, are helping shore up the levee to try to protect the city of Corcoran. This area has now been declared a disaster zone.
We are there when the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, pays a visit. Over the past year he has toured wildfires, drought sites and now numerous areas in California that are underwater.
“There’s not a climate expert or a meteorologist that doesn’t say the following: “We’ve never seen this weather at this level of intensity and extreme”. That’s what is exacerbating the conditions that we’re experiencing,” he says.
Farmers have seen their fields and equipment disappear below the water
I ask what he thinks would have to happen for people to believe in climate change. “Just visit California,” he says with a shrug of the shoulders.
Even those who are more sceptical about climate change cannot deny the reality that more water is on its way to California’s central valley, even to the parts already underwater. For the people who live and work here, that is a terrifying prospect.
Donald Trump has said he wants to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un again.
Speaking at the White House as he held talks with the new South Korean president Lee Jae Myung, Mr Trump told reporters: “I’d like to meet him this year… I look forward to meeting with Kim Jong Un in the appropriate future.”
“I’d like to have a meeting. I got along great with him,” President Trump said, adding they “became very friendly” during his first term in office.
“We think we can do something in that regard,” he said, adding that he would like to help the relationship between the two Koreas.
Trump and Kim at the demilitarized zone in June 2019. Pic: Reuters
Mr Trump and Mr Kim held three meetings between 2018 and 2019 during Mr Trump’s first term and exchanged a number of, what the president called, “beautiful” letters.
In June 2019, Mr Trump briefly stepped into North Korea from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) with South Korea.
The US president on Monday responded to a question about whether he would return to the DMZ by fondly recalling the last time he did so.
“Remember when I walked across the line and everyone went crazy?” especially the Secret Service, Mr Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
But “I loved it”, Mr Trump said. He added he felt safe because he had a good relationship with Mr Kim.
Mr Trump met South Korea’s Lee Jae Myung at the Oval Office on Monday. Pic: Reuters
Mr Trump became the first sitting American president to set foot on North Korean soil six years ago.
However, little progress was made in curbing North Korea’s nuclear programme, and Mr Trump acknowledged in March this year that Pyongyang is a “nuclear power”.
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Since Mr Trump’s first-term meetings with Mr Kim ended, North Korea has shown no interest in returning to talks.
The White House said in June that Mr Trump would welcome communications with Mr Kim.
The attempts at rapprochement come after the election in South Korea of Mr Lee, who has pledged to reopen dialogue with North Korea.
As a gesture of engagement in June, Mr Lee suspended South Korean loudspeakers blasting music and messages into the North at the DMZ along their shared border.
Analysts say, however, that engaging North Korea will likely be more difficult for both Mr Lee and Mr Trump than it was in the president’s first term.
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Since then, North Korea has significantly expanded its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes.
And it has developed close ties with Russia through direct support for Moscow’s war in Ukraine, with Pyongyang providing both troops and weaponry.
Mr Kim told Russian President Vladimir Putin that his country will always stand with Moscow, state media reported in June.
US rapper Lil Nas X has pleaded not guilty after being charged with assaulting a police officer while walking in downtown Los Angeles in his underwear.
The musician, real name Montero Lamar Hill, was taken to hospital and arrested after police responded to reports of a naked man shortly before 6am on Thursday.
The district attorney’s office said on Monday that Lil Nas X faces three counts of battery with injury on a police officer and one count of resisting an executive officer.
He was being held on a $75,000 (£55,457) bail, conditional on attending drug treatment. It is not immediately clear whether he had posted it and been released yet.
He is set to return to court on 15 September for his next pre-trial hearing.
Pic: AP
During the hearing on Monday, Hill’s lawyer Christy O’Connor told the judge he had led a “remarkable” life, adding: “Assuming the allegations here are true, this is an absolute aberration in this person’s life.
“Nothing like this has ever happened to him.”
A law enforcement source told Sky’s US partner network, NBC News, on Thursday that the Old Town Road and Industry Baby hitmaker punched an officer twice in the face during the encounter.
The source added officers were unsure whether he was on any substances or in mental distress.
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NBC News cited TMZ footage where Hill was seen walking down the middle of Ventura Boulevard at 4am on Thursday in a pair of white briefs and cowboy boots.
In the videos, Hill tells a driver to “come to the party” in one clip and in another tells the person: “Didn’t I tell you to put the phone down?”
“Uh oh, someone’s going to have to pay for that,” Hill says as he continues to walk away.
In some clips, Hill struts as if he’s on a catwalk, posing for onlookers, and at one point he places an orange traffic cone on his head.
A man who was wrongly deported from the US to El Salvador has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) again.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 30-year-old originally from El Salvador, handed himself into the ICE field office in Baltimore, Maryland, for a check-in on Monday.
The visit was a mandatory condition of his release from federal custody earlier this weekend. However, in a court filing on Saturday, his lawyers said they expected Garcia would be detained again upon attending.
Garcia is charged in an indictment, filed in federal court in Tennessee, with conspiring to transport illegal immigrants into the US.
An emotional Kilmar Abrego Garcia appears outside the ICE Baltimore field office on 25 August 2025. Pic: Reuters
According to a court filing by his lawyers, immigration officials made an offer to Garcia to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for pleading guilty to the charges.
Otherwise, they would seek to deport him to Uganda.
Pics: Reuters
Speaking at a news conference outside the ICE office on Monday morning, Garcia said via a translator: “This administration has hit us hard, but I want to tell you guys something: God is with us, and God will never leave us.
“God will bring justice to all the injustice we are suffering.”
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Garcia’s lawyers, also said: “There was no need to take him into ICE detention… the only reason they took him into detention was to punish him.”
A judge later ruled Garcia could not be deported after he filed a challenge asking to be allowed due process to fight any removal attempt.
Judge Paula Xinis ruled the 30-year-old must remain detained in the US until she can hold an evidentiary hearing – set for Wednesday.
She added there appeared to be “several grounds” for her to have jurisdiction to exercise relief, including that Uganda has not agreed to offer Garcia protections, such as being able to walk freely, being given refugee status, and not being re-deported to El Salvador.
After initially being detained in Maryland – where he lived with his American wife and children – by ICE in March, Garcia was sent to El Salvador, where he was then imprisoned in the country’s maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
This was despite an immigration judge’s 2019 order granting him protection from deportation after finding he was likely to be persecuted by local gangs if he was returned to his native country.
Garcia was first detained by ICE in March. Pic: CASA/AP
The Trump administration admitted deporting Garcia was an “administrative error”, but said at the time they could not bring him back as they do not have jurisdiction over El Salvador.
After eventually returning him to the US in June, the Trump administration detained Garcia on criminal charges that were filed in May.
The criminal indictment alleges Garcia worked with at least five co-conspirators to bring immigrants to the US illegally and transport them from the border to other destinations in the country.
Minutes after his release on Friday, officials notified Garcia they intended to deport him to Uganda.
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Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, US President Donald Trump, vice president JD Vance and other officials claim Garcia was a member of MS-13 – an international criminal gang formed by immigrants who had fled El Salvador‘s civil war to protect Salvadoran immigrants from rival gangs.
Garcia’s lawyers strongly deny the claims.
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