In fact, it is rock.

As you drive toward the resort you see the grayish-brown rock face to the right of the mountain, more than 9,000 feet above sea level, towering over the verdant green slopes that become the resort’s world-famous ski terrain in winter.

Take the Bridger Gondola up to Rendezvous Lodge, get outfitted with a climbing harness, helmet and lanyards and you’re ready to go.

You don’t even need any climbing experience.

“What the Via Ferrata allows is people with virtually no climbing experience to get into the Alpine experience,” resort spokesman Eric Seymour said during a ride up the gondola last week.

Later this summer — mid-August is the goal — the resort will open its newest routes, three of them, including one that features a new “sky ladder” and a 180-degree Helix Ladder.

“Well, you’re going to start out on this ladder and spin completely around” to face the valley and then back to the mountain, said Wes Bunch, the lead installer for Adventure Partners, the via ferrata design firm that’s been building the new routes since last month, as he sat at a table outside the lodge that overlooks the sprawling valley below and mimicked grabbing onto the rung of a ladder, his body twisting, his eyes wide.

The new routes will join the current collection of climbs with names such as “The Good,” “The Bad” and “The Ugly,” as well as “Shaky” and “Shifty” and the aptly named “Vertigo.”

The route builders have been busy scaling the mountain’s rock faces to “clean” them, as demonstrated by Bunch’s video showing him suspended high above the valley floor last Thursday, pieces of rock tumbling below him as he pried them loose with a crow bar.

Via ferrata translates from the Italian for “iron path.” The term dates back to World War I, when Italian solders built via ferratas to safely cross mountain passes. They became popular as summertime adventures at ski resorts in the Alps in the 1980s and 1990s, and Jackson Hole Mountain Resort co-owner Connie Kemmerer, an avid mountain climber, came home and wanted one here, Seymour said.

The first routes opened in 2017. Yhen came Via Ferrata 2.0 in the summer of 2019. Now comes 3.0.

“The new routes are going to be so cool,” said Giles LaJevic-Augustine, a Via Ferrata guide.

All climbs are led by experienced guides, and climbers make their way up the various routes, rated from easy to intermediate to difficult, via rebar steps drilled into the rock while snapping carabiner clips to a cable along the route. That allows virtually anyone with the athletic ability a chance to experience climbing in the Tetons, versus traditional rock climbing, which typically requires someone to belay the climber on rope.

“As soon as I can touch that next section of cable I’ll move my carabiners right away,” LaJevic-Augustine said as he demonstrated how to ascend the intermediate Straight Shot route in the Gateway Area just east of Rendezvous Lodge. “That way if I fall, it’s a very short fall.”

LaJevic-Augustine said that he’s led more than 700 tours of the resort’s Via Ferrata and it wasn’t until just a couple of weeks ago that he had a climber, a 42-year-old woman, slip while climbing on the Crystal Caves route, one of the most difficult routes on the mountain’s Casper Buttress Area. But she was fine, he said, her harness keeping her secure.

Falling is rare, said Bunch, a longtime climber and former Exum Mountain Guide.

“You get very focused up there,” he said laughing.

Of course, climbing the Via Ferrata will cost you. Parties of two can scale its rocks starting at $450 for a half day (3.5 hours) to $620 for a full day (six hours). There’s an additional fee for each added member of your climbing party.

For those willing to make the ascent, it’s more than worth it, Bunch said.

“We want to bring out people’s inner child,” he said. “Like a kid climbing a tree.”