A young mother drowned Sunday after being swept away at a river crossing near a popular Southern California hiking trail, a tragedy that unfolded as a mountain rescue team was stationed on the trail to warn hikers about dangerous conditions.

The San Dimas Mountain Rescue Team said it was talking with hikers about safety tips and river crossings around 8 a.m. while set up at the Bridge to Nowhere trailhead on the East Fork of the San Gabriel River in Angeles National Forest when “in an instant, everything changed.”

“A frantic runner came charging up the trail yelling for help,” the rescue team said in a news release. “A young mother had fallen in at the second river crossing and was swept away by the raging current.”

“Our worst fears became reality,” it continued.

Rescuers immediately launched an emergency response. Multiple agencies responded, including Los Angeles County Fire Department, Air Operations, the LASD Aero Bureau and the San Dimas Sheriff’s Station.

Crews located the woman after an extensive search. She was pronounced deceased, and the mission shifted to a recovery operation. The woman’s identity has not been released.

Rescuers said they later assisted the woman’s grieving family at the command post.

MOUNTAIN BIKERS FIND MISSING HIKER WANDERING WILDERNESS IN UNDERWEAR

“All we could offer were hugs, water, shade, and our presence in their darkest moment,” the rescue team said. “No words can fix this kind of loss.”

Officials warned that recent conditions have made the East Fork especially dangerous, with swift, high water and multiple required river crossings along the Bridge to Nowhere Trail.

Authorities are urging hikers to avoid the area until water levels significantly drop.

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“Turn around if the water looks too fast or too deep,” rescuers said. “Your life is worth more than any hike.”

Angeles National Forest is located northeast of Los Angeles.

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SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Environmental Scientist Kayli Paterson from the San Francisco Estuary Institute is hitting the road with colleague David Peterson and a trunk full of water sampling robots.

“Yeah, I think the max we’ve ever done was five. But the sites are very close together. Oh, there it is. Hopefully it samples well,” says Paterson as she turns the mobile sampling lab onto a private oak-lined road.

They’re closing in on a watershed creek flowing through the hillsides near the San Andreas Lake reservoir, west of Highway 280 in Millbrae, part of the larger watershed that eventually drains into San Francisco Bay.

“So, we’ve got our sampler. Look at the battery. Hook that up, red and black. This is a 12-volt lithium battery, and it powers our sampler for probably about six to seven days,” she explains, showing off a self-contained unit miniaturized into a portable case.

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The black cases are their latest innovation in stormwater science. Robotic samplers anchor in key sections of the watershed to monitor not only flow, but also the chemicals and pollutants washing downstream toward the Bay.

“And this is a front-line pollution sampler. It’s getting the stormwater before it enters the Bay. And so, we want to know what’s coming into the Bay and getting these samplers out there in more locations will give us a better idea of where we might have issues, where a hotspot is, or maybe a previously unknown contaminant,” says Paterson.

“It’s important to get out that fast,” her colleague David Peterson adds. “You know, in these storms as they’re happening, because the water is picking up pollutants in real time, and we need to be there to capture them.”

When we first met Peterson several years ago, he and another Estuary Institute team were sampling water along the Bay shoreline by hand, a technique that’s still valuable. But to cover more ground, Kayli and a group of collaborators began developing the robotic samplers over recent storm seasons.

Kayli and David start by chaining the unit itself to a tree near the creek bank. The system employs remote-controlled pumps that draw samples from the creek and store them in onboard containers. The software controlling the volume and frequency can be operated from a phone app.

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One of the key targets in this study is a group of so-called “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, synthetic compounds that persist in the environment and have been detected in widespread areas of the Bay.

“And we capture samples and send them off to analytics labs across the country. Typically, universities or private labs will process these for us,” Peterson explains.

For these two stormwater detectives, it’s a mission that requires a combination of speed and patience**, chasing flowing water** through creeks and storm drains, sampling as they go.

“So, we’re looking for areas – the point of this is to do source control. Ultimately, we want to be able to trace this back to a possible source,” says Kayli Paterson.

And potentially prevent a source of toxic pollution from reaching San Francisco Bay and our Bay Area ecosystem.

More than a dozen of the robots were given names in a special contest, including the Big Sipper and the Tubeinator.

The Denver Broncos are in the market for a running back.

Just two days after NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reported that Denver wants to have the running back position addressed before the draft, Jonathan Jones of CBS Sports reported that the Broncos are “poised to make a splash” at running back during NFL free agency.

“Denver is the reason why the Jets used the franchise tag on Breece Hall rather than the transition tag, according to sources, making sure Denver wouldn’t get the opportunity to put together an offer the Jets would refuse to match,” Jones wrote for CBS Sports.

Jones said the Broncos would be an obvious potential landing spot for Kenneth Walker, and he noted that Travis Etienne could be a cheaper alternative. The Athletic’s Nick Kosmider also reported this week that Denver is expected to “closely examine” the RB market, and he name-dropped Walker, Etienne and Rico Dowdle.