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Great River Road: La Crescent to Iowa

Great River Road: La Crescent to Iowa is 21.1 miles of point-to-point riding through Houston County in Minnesota — Bluff Country, the root river valley, the mississippi bluffs and the ridge roads above them. Moving time is about 25 minutes; allow 35 with stops — a quick spin. It is scored CS-1, Cruiser: 9 corners, 60° of turning per mile, 546 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.

Curviness
CS-1Cruiser · 0.43/mi
Distance
21.1 mi25 min riding
Corners
90% sharp · Sweeping
Climbing
546 ft26 ft/mi · Gentle
Shape
Point-to-pointQuick spin
Roads
0% back road100% state or US route
Traffic
Not countedno state counts on these roads
Speed limit
Unpostedno posted limits recorded
Open this route in the app

About this road

Twenty-one miles with the river on one side and the bluffs on the other, and almost nothing asked of the rider. MN 26 runs from MN 16 near La Crescent south to the Iowa line at New Albin, where it carries on as IA 26; it is part of the Great River Road, which the Minnesota Department of Transportation describes as 565 miles of state and local roads through the state and a National Scenic Byway. It is the flattest and straightest road in this corpus - nine counted corners in twenty-one miles, sixty degrees of turning a mile, twenty-six feet of climb a mile - and that is the point of it rather than a failing. The bluffs it runs under stand about three hundred feet above the road, and for the first miles out of New Albin the backwaters lie a couple of miles east; at Reno the river widens into the pool behind Lock and Dam No. 8. North of Brownsville the road leaves the water and turns inland. No stretch of it carries a posted speed limit in the map data, so the app shows no limit for the whole road. That is a gap in the map rather than an absence of signs.

Sources: MnDOT Great River Road scenic byway page; Minnesota State Highway 26.

How it rides

9 corners over 21.1 miles — 0.43 a mile, and 60° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-1, Cruiser on the five-point curviness scale. 0% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as sweeping.

What it climbs

The road climbs 546 feet in total, 26 feet per mile, between 629 and 737 feet — 108 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 65 feet over 0.7 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 4.1%. For this country that is gentle.

Surface, speed and traffic

Paved end to end. 0% of it is back road rather than highway, the other 100% state or US route. No posted speed limits are recorded for these roads. State traffic counts cover only None% of these miles, too little to put a number on, which is itself a fair sign of how quiet they are.

Where to stop

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

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.

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 NASA SRTM, traffic from the state transport department where counts exist.

Nearby roads