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Czech Corner

Czech Corner is 38.6 miles of loop riding through Winneshiek and Howard Counties in Iowa — Driftless Iowa, the Upper Iowa, the Yellow River country and the climbs out of the Mississippi. Moving time is about 49 minutes; allow 70 with stops — a half morning. It is scored CS-3, Spirited: 53 corners, 125° of turning per mile, 1,625 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.

Curviness
CS-3Spirited · 1.37/mi
Distance
38.6 mi49 min riding
Corners
5342% sharp · Mixed
Climbing
1,625 ft42 ft/mi · Hilly
Shape
LoopHalf morning
Roads
Backroads75% county & local
Traffic
—no published counts
Speed limit
55 mphtypically 55
Open this route in the app

About this road

In the 1850s Bohemian settlers found the rolling ridges around Spillville, Protivin, and Fort Atkinson familiar enough to call home. They built churches, halls, and farms that still shape the land. Composer Antonín Dvořák spent the summer of 1893 in Spillville playing the organ at St. Wenceslaus and writing music; the Bily Clocks museum keeps that connection alive. Older cemeteries hold Czech inscriptions, and the festivals keep the culture living. The roads here are gentler than the deepest Yellow River or Upper Iowa coulees, yet they still rise and fall with the classic Driftless rhythm. Open ridges give way to wooded draws; small crossroads communities punctuate the miles. A stop in Spillville turns a pleasant ride into a conversation with both landscape and history. Easy to love, easy to return to—the Czech Corner of northeast Iowa.

How it rides

53 corners over 38.6 miles — 1.37 a mile, and 125° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-3, Spirited on the five-point curviness scale. 42% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as mixed.

What it climbs

The road climbs 1,625 feet in total, 42 feet per mile, between 875 and 1,281 feet — 405 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 197 feet over 1.7 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 7.9%. By Driftless standards that is hilly.

Surface, speed and traffic

95.0% paved — the rest is gravel or seal coat, so check the surface before you commit. 75% of it is back road rather than highway, the other 25% state or US route. Posted speeds run to 55 mph, typically 55, measured across 23% of the route. No published traffic counts cover this route, so it carries no traffic figure rather than a borrowed one.

Where to stop

1 of the towns on this road has somewhere to stop — 3 fuel, 6 food, 2 bars.

Longest stretch without fuel: 38.6 miles. Worth knowing before you set off if your tank is small.

Listed alphabetically, and chosen by us rather than rated by anybody. The order you reach them, and the mile each one sits at, are in the app.

Worth knowing

Turn-by-turn directions and the spoken guidance are in the app. Every figure on this page is measured from the route itself — corner counts and gradients from the road geometry, elevation from the national elevation dataset, traffic from the state transport departments where counts exist.

Nearby roads