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Waukon to Decorah Backroads

Waukon to Decorah Backroads is 22.3 miles of point-to-point riding through Allamakee and Winneshiek Counties in Iowa — Driftless Iowa, the Upper Iowa, the Yellow River country and the climbs out of the Mississippi. Moving time is about 34 minutes; allow 50 with stops — a quick spin. It is scored CS-2, Easy: 28 corners, 136° of turning per mile, 641 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.

Curviness
CS-2Easy · 1.25/mi
Distance
22.3 mi34 min riding
Corners
2879% sharp · Tight
Climbing
641 ft29 ft/mi · Gentle
Shape
Point-to-pointQuick spin
Roads
Backroads100% county & local
Traffic
—no published counts
Open this route in the app

About this road

Two county seats share a name rooted in the same Ho-Chunk family line—Waukon Decorah and the related leaders of the 1820s and 1830s. The short back-road connection between Waukon and Decorah drops and climbs through classic ridge-and-coulee country. Waukon sits higher and more open; the approach to Decorah descends into the more intricate Upper Iowa valleys. Both towns keep strong local character and nineteenth-century streetscapes. The ride is brief but revealing. The same cultural history sits on two slightly different landforms, and the roads make the difference tangible. Elevation changes are frequent rather than long; the feeling is intimate and local. If you already know the longer river loops, this point-to-point between Waukon and Decorah offers a concentrated look at how settlement and landscape still shape everyday geography in northeast Iowa.

How it rides

28 corners over 22.3 miles — 1.25 a mile, and 136° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-2, Easy on the five-point curviness scale. 79% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as tight.

What it climbs

The road climbs 641 feet in total, 29 feet per mile, between 845 and 1,279 feet — 434 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 262 feet over 2.4 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 6.9%. By Driftless standards that is gentle.

Surface, speed and traffic

78.0% paved — the rest is gravel or seal coat, so check the surface before you commit. 100% of it is back road rather than highway. No published traffic counts cover this route, so it carries no traffic figure rather than a borrowed one.

Where to stop

2 of the towns on this road have somewhere to stop — 4 fuel, 11 food, 3 bars.

Longest stretch without fuel: 22.2 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