Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 very basic guide August 4, 2008
This guide is not very good. We bought during our trip to Seneca rocks and quickly discovered that it was totaly useless. It only covers major areas and descriptions and directions are preety bad. If you are looking for good climbing guide for Maryland get 'Climb Maryland' by Indy Kochte
 Good guidebook November 14, 2007
This is a comprehensive guidebook. It includes pretty much every major climbing area in WV, VA, and MD. Its got a good detailed chapter on Old Rag mountain in Shenandoah that other guides don't cover nearly as well. On the other hand, you should get the guidebooks for a specific area (like New River Gorge or Seneca Rocks) if you'll be doing a lot of climbing at a particular spot, because of its broad scope this guidebook won't include all routes for those areas, nor the smaller crags scattered around the region. There's a great guidebook called Climb Maryland! that treats all the central MD spots really well.
Very good MD/VA guide book July 31, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Eric's book is all encompassing for the DC metro area climber. It is well written and covers all of the popular climbs. I gave it 4 stars, because I would have liked to have seen just a hair more beta and info about individual climbs, but all-in-all this is a "must have."
 In-depth? No. Comprehensive overview? Yes. March 14, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This FalconGuide is one of the better ones available, and for the travelling climber, or the DC-centric climber, probably THE book to have (there are non-Falcon guides that specifically cover Virginia and Maryland in more detail, but are only really useful if you primarily climb in those specific states). Eric Horst worked long and hard, contacting a plethora of local climbers at the various crags noted within these pages to get route information, do photo shoots, and be given tours of the area to get a general feel of the land. He covers some of the more or most popular areas in Maryland/DC/Virginia (Sugarloaf, Rocks State Park, Great Falls, Crescent Rocks) as well as *the* two big weekend destinations in West Virginia (Seneca Rocks, New River Gorge), but interspersed are numerous "local" crags that you might never have known about otherwise (short of locating one of the state-specific or crag-specific books that might or might not exist). This serves to give you options to go elsewhere when you can't make it to one of the more popular climbing spots, or if the weather is entirely TOO nice and hordes of people have descended on the main crags, alternate places to go and get vertical. Also, the number of small climbing areas gives the travelling climber options for places to go when they simply cannot get out to, say, Seneca when on the road down around, say, Charlottesville. Crack open Eric's guide and see what's nearby!
The route descriptions are pretty good, and nicely supplemented with a mix of topo photos and drawings (if you're not an artist and you've tried to draw a topo to a crag, you can appreciate how difficult it can be to get it just right!).
Eric successfully treaded the fine balancing act to not reinvent the wheel for places that already havae extensive guidebooks (e.g., Great Falls, et al), but at the same time, adequately cover crags that have or had absolutely no guidebook at all.
More than just a simple guide, Eric's book also gives you a little bit of climbing history to many of the crags, details travel/trip information, has nice readable maps. He spends 18 pages on a general introduction, then devotes the next 380 pages to the various crags.
Even if you only climb in Virginia, Maryland, or West Virginia, and already have one of the state-specific or area-specific guides, this is still an excellent book to have for the day when you might want to step across the border. :-)
great book April 19, 2004
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Very detailed, professionaly written, accurate. In fact provides more information on a given area than other publications. I climbed using this book as a guide.
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