It's tough to be a climber if you live in places like Kansas, Louisiana, Florida, Nebraska, and Delaware for starters. A lot of those flat places just don't have cliffs or even boulders to climb on and when you do find rock, it's often chossy and short. Ditto if you live in most major urban areas in the United States. If you go climbing, you go to the indoor gym and dream about touching real rock and standing on table-top summits.

A few cities along the Eastern seaboard though actually  have some decent rock for climbing. Boston climbers go to Quincy Quarries, Hammond Pond, and Crow Hill, while New Yorkers head to Rat Rock in Central Park. Surprisingly, another good place to do some real climbing is the Washington DC area, including cliffs that drop into the Potomac River at Great Falls on the Virginia side and Carderock, a low rampart just above the river on the Maryland side.

Although I'm a native Coloradoan, I've been to Carderock quite a few times on my eastern travels and since the 1970s have managed to climb almost all the named routes there. Carderock, a 25- to 60-foot-high west-facing cliff, packs a lot of routes, variations, and boulder problems onto a relatively small cliff that's only a short drive from a heck of a lot of people. Few cracks are found so most routes are top-ropes, especially since it has a no-bolt ethic and lies within the Cheaspeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park. Caredrock is also one of the oldest climbing areas in the East, with climbers regularly training here since the 1920s.

Carderock--it's a home crag. One of those places where a lot of us learned to climb, where we first touched rock, where we saw our first real climber as he danced up a hard route. I've always had a good time climbing there, meeting locals and talking about climbing and good times. Check out my new article Carderock Rock Climbing: Climbing Near Washington DC for all the beta on visiting and climbing at Carderock, one of the best crags in the DC area.

Read Carderock Rock Climbing: Climbing Near Washington DC

Photograph above: Jan's Face, named for legendary Needles climber Jan Conn, is a popular sector for easy routes at Carderock. Photograph © Stewart M. Green

Mount Shasta, a 14,179-foot (4,322 meters) stratovolcano, dominates northern California's skyline. The mountain's symmetrical cone, usually gleaming alabaster white with snow, is simply one of America's most beautiful mountains and one that excites climbers, naturalists, and poets.

California poet Joaquin Miller described Mount Shasta: "Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up sudden and solitary from the heart of the great black forests of Northern California." The great naturalist John Muir climbed Shasta several times. He wrote, "When I first caught sight of it over the braided folds of the Sacramento Valley, I was fifty miles away and afoot, alone and weary. Yet all my blood turned to wine, and I have not been weary since." Mount Shasta has that kind of effect on you.

Read a new peak profile Facts About Mount Shasta -- California's Fifth Highest Mountain and learn all kinds of interesting facts, figures, and stories about the mountain's geology, volcanic eruptions, natural history, first ascent, significance in Native American legends and New Age lore, and how to climb it.

Learn more about Mount Shasta at: Facts About Mount Shasta -- California's Fifth Highest Mountain.

Photograph above: An aerial view of Mount Shasta reveals craters and its violent volcanic past. Photograph © Baron Wolman/Getty Images.

I just watched the new video/commercial starring Bear Grylls as a "Master of Movement" as he free climbs Tombstone Butte, a 350-foot-high sandstone tower northwest of Moab, Utah. When I say he free climbs the tower, I mean it loosely. The video, while having some beautiful cinematography, is a badly staged commercial for a deodorant. I was surprised that Bear didn't swipe his armpits after running onto the summit at the end.

Read my comprehensive review of this new Bear Grylls video and find out all the reasons why I absolutely hated it. For starters, it's chockful of inaccuracies and it's portrayal of climbing, including Bear's cheesey voiceover dialogue, takes us back to the Vertical Limit days.

Really, couldn't the producer find some climbers that knew something about climbing and could help them film something real and exciting and, yes, beautiful like the Citibank commercial of Katie Brown and Alex Honnold climbing Ancient Art? At least they are real climbers and not real posers like Bear Grylls.

Grrrrrrr...don't get me started! Read the guide review and let me know your thoughts.

Read Guide Review--Bear Grylls Climbing Video: Not a Master of Movement

Photograph above: Bear Grylls chalking up below Tombstone Butte. How many goof-ups can you spot in this photo? Photograph courtesy Bear Grylls.

Here's a funny photograph of a bunch of guys carrying a keg of beer to the summit of 14,197-foot Mount Princeton, one of Colorado's Fourteeners, last July 30.

James Schermerhorn, who took the photo and posted it on 14ers.com, reported that he passed them going up while he was heading down at about 13,000 feet and that "they were moving at a snail's pace, and I know the monsoon clouds were moving in...I also think a keg is a pretty good lightning conductor. That was my concern."

"I was told it was a Bachelor Party," James wrote on 14ers.com. "One of the guys got engaged on the summit of Princeton, and this was how they were celebrating his Bachelor Party. They said they tried to hire strippers to come along, but none wanted to climb."

Lisa Carey wrote, "I was hiking at the same time as the 'dudes' having the bachelor party. They were not drunk. They were very courteous and had good clean fun. It was actually the only productive bachelor party I have ever heard of. They did not bring any cups (thus no garbage) up with them so we all had to do keg stands to help them drink it...They were kind, courteous, did not litter and shared."

Then Cutup75, one of the keg bearers, responded, "We are all safe and sound! It was a great trip. Great teamwork, great communication, and a great reward! We were met with encouragement, smiles and tons of pictures. Plus keg stands at 14,197 feet is pretty sweet! There were 2 guys in our group that Princeton was their first, which was very cool! We had 3 Iraq vet Marines, 1 being the bachelor, 1 in our group that summited Denali last summer, and a lot of mountain bike and road bike endurance races/rides between us. This personally was my 7th 14er. It took us right about 3 hours 15 minutes to the summit, 1 hr-ish at the top and less than 2 hours down. Oh, the beer was still very cold at the top too!"

Well, I don't know if I would haul a keg of Coors beer to the summit of a Fourteener, but you gotta have fun when you go climbing! Good on you boys...you won't forget that sudsy adventure.

Photograph above: A happy group of guys carries a keg of beer to the summit of Mount Princeton in the Colorado Rockies. Photograph courtesy James Winchester Schermerhorn