This wasn't a very enjoyable summit for me. The hardest part was probably finding a parking spot and starting place. I made sure to look up past routes and do my research before doing the climb. But every starting point was either ambiguous or requires parking at a residential area. Personally, I'm not a fan of parking in a residential area so I did some more scouring and found a trip report of parking on the CVS by the base of the mountain (55th ave and Happy Valley Rd) . Sure I guess. The trip report mentioned walking through the neighborhood until reaching the base of the summit, but that didn't really work out for me. I was unable to find any access to the mountain from that particular residential area (the North side of the mountain does have access and it seems that most people climb through there). I went back to the intersection and started walking towards the base of the mountain through the Happy Valley Rd sidewalk. Very quickly I found a dirt road that seems to be used fairly often by both vehicles and bikers. This led me to finally look for a potential route to start my climb.

At this point I felt I had wasted a lot of time trying to figure out where to start and where to park. Not to mention traffic was a nightmare. So I felt like it was getting a bit late for the climb, and was wondering if I should try another day. But here I was staring at the slope on the eastern side feeling determined to climb it. Not my best decision to be completely honest.

The climb itself was pretty straightforward route finding. Lots of boulders made it easy to boulder hop my way up. Some were loose but most were perfectly fine to step on. Every now and then I would use my arm for support but honestly not bad at all. My biggest problem however was that I quickly realized that the locals around the area seem to hang out on luddens mountain quite often. How you may ask ? Well most of scramble up consisted of me avoiding broken glass and plastic bottles. And it was exactly this that dampened my experience climbing to the summit. I was already feeling not great from my struggle finding a starting point, feeling the stress of it getting dark, and now I'm jumping around avoiding broken beer glass everywhere. One bad fall or even grabbing on to a bad rock could suddenly turn into glass cuts. Again, this was my experience climbing through the eastern slope. Maybe the northern slope isn't as bad.

Once I reached the top, the sun had already ducked in the horizon with sunlight quickly diminishing. I took a quick 5 minute breather before starting my descent.

My descent was mostly in the dark alongside the North Eastern slope. I honestly can't tell you if this section had glass or not as I was mostly focusing on choosing where to step with nothing but a flimsy flashlight in my hand. I regretted leaving my headlight back at home thinking I'd be done way earlier.

All in all, probably my worst experience climbing up a mountain. But alas, it could have been just a bad day and a bad mindset that's all. I just wish people would respect their mountains some more.

/rant over