RIVERTON, W.VA. -- Nature is unpredictable and unsafe," begins the warning sign on the side of the Nelson Rocks Preserve registration hut. "Mountains are dangerous. Many books have been written about these dangers and there's no way we can list them all here. Read the books."

A little further down:

"A whole rock formation might collapse on you and squash you like a bug. Don't think it can't happen."

And just to make sure no one's left confused:

"It's a fact, climbing is extremely dangerous. If you don't like it, stay home. You really shouldn't be doing it anyway."

But there we were, a group of 11, staring up at the cliff face, about to begin doing exactly what the warning cautioned us not to. We were here to climb the via ferrata -- "iron road" in Italian.

No one looks like a hardened climber. These are dads, young daughters, grandparents craning their necks to see where, exactly, this climb is going to take us.

When the father-son team in front of me was far enough ahead, I stepped to the wall, clipped my caribeeners to the metal cord, grabbed a stainless steel rung and left solid ground for the next three hours.

Via ferratas are fixed, or permanent, metal climbing routes. A metal cable, about as thick as your ring finger, is bolted to the rock at varying intervals. Imagine one of those low lying fences with a single metal chain slung between two posts -- the kind that imply "Keep off my grass" but really just invite kids to swing on them. Now imagine that fence on a cliff side with metal bolts in place of the posts. That's sort of what it looks like.

Via ferratas began in Italy, in the Dolomite Mountains, as a way to move troops and supplies through the mountains quickly and safely during WWI.

Climbers are equipped with a climbing harness, a lanyard, two carabiniers and a helmet.

The lanyard is a Y-shape made from climbing rope. The stem of the Y is tied through my climbing harness. The arms dangle free, with a carabinier attached at each end. This is what keeps climbers attached to the metal cord or, in other words, from falling.

Lavonne, 55, has a good sense of humor. Sitting on the porch of the registration office, smoking a cigarette and sipping coffee, she recounts how she and her husband, Stuart, 50, a lawyer from Maryland, ended up in tiny Riverton, W.Va.

In the early '90s Stuart, a climber, took Lavonne to Nelson Rocks, which was privately owned by a local family but was often climbed by the public.

"I love this property. I want to buy it," he told her, adding that it'd never be up for sale.

The Hammetts, who lived in Maryland, looked into several business opportunities and properties in the area throughout the '90s, but everything fell through. Then, one day, Stuart opened the pages of the Pendleton Times county newspaper, which they had mailed to their home, and saw an ad for Nelson's Rock.

"He grabbed his hat, his keys, his wallet and said 'I'm going to West Virginia and I'm buying Nelson's Rock, and he jumped in the truck and drove off," Lavonne said, laughing.

"I was like, 'OK.' "

The majority of the 2,000 climbers who come here each season have little or no climbing experience. According to Lavonne, anyone able to do a "hearty hike" and isn't too scared of heights is able to do the via. Before the climb, Lavonne checks in clients and Stuart gives a safety talk.

Stuart launches into a 40-minute safety talk. After covering the basics of how to use the equipment. it's mostly a laundry list of things not to do.

"Every time someone does something stupid, this talk gets longer," he says.

He compares falling on the via to a car's airbag -- it'll save you, but it'll hurt. One climber broke his ankle when he slipped off the rock. Then again, that climber wouldn't have fallen in the first place if he'd been using the metal rungs that were painstakingly drilled into the rock. Instead, he was trying to use everything but the rungs.

So now Stuart must add to his talk, "Please use the rungs."

He's also careful to stress climbers should unclip only one carabineer at a time. A young woman was killed two years ago when she unclipped both carabineers while negotiating her way around a tree and fell from the ledge.

"If you fell, it could still beat you up pretty bad, so you don't want to insinuate that it's safe. You just want to say it's a reasonable calculated risk," says Tom Cecil, 47, owner of Seneca Rocks Mountain Guides. He and some of his staff helped build the via.

Justin Day, 27, of Seneca Rocks, is one of the handful of workers.

"We came back from [climbing in] Thailand one year and [Stuart] was like, 'I want to build this via ferrata.' And we were like, 'Whoa! We've never built a via ferrata before, but we'll try!'" he says.

Seven days a week for four months, he and four to five other people, all current or former employees of Seneca Rock Mountain Guides, set the route and drilled holes 7 to 14 inches deep into the tuscarora quartzite rock. The rock was so hard, a $50 drill bit lasted only about five holes. The climb, which takes three hours to complete, gains 1,000 feet in elevation -- every inch labored over with a generator hauled along the way.

"I had all the guys staying in our house in Riverton. We'd come back to the house in the evening and talk for hours about that day and the problems we were going to face the next day," says Stuart, with more than a hint of nostalgia. "It was really exciting and rewarding. As it started to come together, we knew we were doing something that was really unique."

He wanted to build the via to show beginners "where climbing can take you."

"What is really amazing about the via is that it's not really discovered, I don't think. People have no idea just how outrageous it is," says Cecil.

The route, which Cecil helped design, is a mix of scrambling along diagonal traverses and straight-up climbing, using the rungs like a ladder. At the top of the first fin of rock, climbers reach the "Scheisse Notch," a V at the top of the cliff climbers swing around and then down-climb to a ledge.

The valley that encompasses Pendleton County is a thousand shades of green, the surrounding mountains are rich and dark and blurred by tree tops, the air is sweet with cut grass and earth. If you didn't realize all this before, you realize it at the Scheisse Notch.

Rivaling the notch for most-memorable-thing-ever is the 200-foot-long, swinging "Burma-style" bridge, which connects to the parallel fin of rock. Think "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" minus the snapping crocodiles. The boards are about the width of a DVD case and spaced roughly 10 inches apart. A thin line of metal cord runs above it, so climbers remained clipped in.

A guide sits under a tree at the edge of the bridge and offers sage words of wisdom.

"Have fun."

Nicole Testerman, 24, of Bel Air, Md., is terrified of heights. The first time she went climbing, at an indoor climbing gym, she panicked when she was 13 feet off the ground.

The bridge hangs at 150 feet.

"The bridge was really, absolutely the scariest thing I've ever done in my life. But if I can do the bridge, I can do anything," she says.

Where does she hope climbing will take her next?

Thailand.