ScenicCurvesVillage Creek and the Yellow River
Village Creek and the Yellow River is a tour: 75.7 miles, ridden out and back, through Allamakee County in Iowa — Driftless Iowa. Moving time is about 96 minutes; allow 140 with stops. It is scored CS-3, Spirited: 101 corners, 130° of turning per mile, 4,557 feet of climbing. Every mile of it is road that a route in the corpus already publishes — nothing here is new ground, and no route was changed to make it. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app. It rides out and turns at mile 37.85, so the second half is the first half the other way round — which on these roads is a different ride, and is still the same pavement.
- Curviness
- CS-3Spirited · 1.33/mi
- Distance
- 75.7 mi96 min riding
- Corners
- 10132% sharp · Sweeping
- Climbing
- 4,557 ft60 ft/mi · Relentless
- Shape
- Out and backFull day
- Surface
- 100% paved68% county and local
- Speed limit
- Unpostedno posted limits recorded on these roads
- Traffic
- Not counteda tour's traffic is not yet measured
About this road
Allamakee County is the north-east corner of Iowa and none of it was flattened by ice. The tour works east from the Waukon ridges down the creek valleys to the Mississippi at Harpers Ferry, then turns and rides the same roads back. Most of what it crosses drains into the Yellow River or Village Creek; the Iowa Department of Natural Resources puts more than 8,900 acres across the six units of Yellow River State Forest here, with seven miles of trout streams inside the forest and more than 50 miles of trails. This is the gentlest-scoring of the five tours and the one with the least posted speed on it: the match against the Iowa extract found no maxspeed tag on any of its miles, so the app shows no limit at all for the whole ride. That is a gap in the map rather than an absence of signs, and it is worth knowing before setting a pace by what the screen says.
Sources: Iowa DNR, Yellow River State Forest.
The climb
What it is built from
Roads from 4 routes already in the corpus: Yellow River Country, Yellow River and the Volney Coulees, Dorchester and the Northern Ridges, Village Creek and the Yellow River.
Ride it
Tours are part of a subscription rather than the three free roads: a tour is a day built out of ten of them. See what a subscription costs, or open the app if you already have one.