Along the Earl Canyon Mountainway above La Cañada Flintridge

As I drive up the Glendale (2) Freeway each weekday morning on my way to the La Cañada Valley Sun, my eye always settles on the scars in mountainside directly in front of me. They are the cuts of the Earl Canyon Mountainway.The first scar shows low on a ridge in Hall Beckley Canyon, above Palm Crest Elementary School. The trail disappears around a bend and reappears higher on the mountain, then does so again on the final stretch to the spot where the crestline meets the sky.As I study the trail, I’m driving side by side with other worker bees on the 2. But I want to leave the concrete ribbon. Finally, the other day, I decided work could wait. I hit the trail for two hours. That wasn’t enough time to deliver meatballs to a back country bear, but it was enough to find some solitude and take in the Los Angeles basin, the blue Pacific and the forest still recovering from the 2009 Station fire. Here’s a look at what I saw, through the lens of my BlackBerry.-- Bill Kisliuk, Times Community News