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Great River Road: New Albin to McGregor

Great River Road: New Albin to McGregor is 39.2 miles of point-to-point riding through Allamakee and Clayton Counties in Iowa — Driftless Iowa, the Upper Iowa, the Yellow River country and the climbs out of the Mississippi. Moving time is about 47 minutes; allow 70 with stops — a half morning. It is scored CS-2, Easy: 42 corners, 101° of turning per mile, 2,392 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.

Curviness
CS-2Easy · 1.07/mi
Distance
39.2 mi47 min riding
Corners
4231% sharp · Sweeping
Climbing
2,392 ft61 ft/mi · Relentless
Shape
Point-to-pointHalf morning
Roads
Backroads97% county & local
Traffic
—no published counts
Speed limit
45 mphtypically 45
Open this route in the app

About this road

Follow the Mississippi from New Albin to McGregor and you’re riding a corridor that has carried people for thousands of years. Indigenous travelers, voyageurs, steamboats, and finally the modern Great River Road all used this same path beside the water. The bluffs tower above you—carved by the force of melting ice ages ago—leaving a landscape of sudden height and long views. McGregor and Marquette still feel like river towns, their streets angled toward the water that once made them prosper. A short detour reaches Effigy Mounds National Monument, where two hundred and six mounds overlook the same river, thirty-one of them shaped like bears and birds. Climb to Pikes Peak State Park or any of the high overlooks and you’ll see three states at once. This is a ride that stays in conversation with the big water. The road rises and falls with the bluffs, the Mississippi stays in sight, and every pull-off offers another version of the same powerful story.

How it rides

42 corners over 39.2 miles — 1.07 a mile, and 101° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-2, Easy on the five-point curviness scale. 31% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as sweeping.

What it climbs

The road climbs 2,392 feet in total, 61 feet per mile, between 621 and 1,126 feet — 505 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 484 feet over 2.8 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 9.6%. By Driftless standards that is relentless.

Surface, speed and traffic

98.8% paved; the odd short stretch is gravel or seal coat. 97% of it is back road rather than highway, the other 3% state or US route. Posted speeds run to 45 mph, typically 45, measured across 1% of the route. No published traffic counts cover this route, so it carries no traffic figure rather than a borrowed one.

Where to stop

4 of the towns on this road have somewhere to stop — 2 fuel, 6 food, 4 bars.

Longest stretch without fuel: 28.3 miles. Worth knowing before you set off if your tank is small. Some towns on this road are not yet measured along the line, so treat that as the worst case rather than the likely one.

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