ScenicCurves

Home / Routes / Minnesota / Lenora and the Old Stone Church

Lenora and the Old Stone Church

Lenora and the Old Stone Church is 70.3 miles of loop riding through Fillmore and Houston Counties in Minnesota — Bluff Country, the Root River valley, the Mississippi bluffs and the ridge roads above them. Moving time is about 89 minutes; allow 130 with stops — a full day. It is scored CS-2, Easy: 74 corners, 84° of turning per mile, 3,150 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.

Curviness
CS-2Easy · 1.05/mi
Distance
70.3 mi89 min riding
Corners
7449% sharp · Tight
Climbing
3,150 ft45 ft/mi · Steep
Shape
LoopFull day
Roads
Backroads90% county & local
Traffic
355vehicles a day, median
Speed limit
60 mphtypically 60
Open this route in the app

About this road

Lenora’s old stone church, built by early settlers from the abundant local rock, remains a quiet landmark on the ridge. This long loop explores quieter corners of Fillmore and Houston counties, where stone churches and schoolhouses are characteristic of the Norwegian and mixed immigrant communities that settled the uplands. The terrain is rolling to steep, with enough climbing to feel the character of the country without extreme demand. The surviving nineteenth-century rural architecture around Lenora gives the landscape a human time-depth that matches the geological one. Traffic is light; the sense of traveling through a working agricultural landscape is strong. The loop doesn’t depend on a single dramatic overlook. Its interest is cumulative—repeated encounters with the vernacular buildings and the ridge-and-valley rhythm that shaped them. Ideal for riders who value cultural landscape as much as pure elevation.

How it rides

74 corners over 70.3 miles — 1.05 a mile, and 84° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-2, Easy on the five-point curviness scale. 49% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as tight.

What it climbs

The road climbs 3,150 feet in total, 45 feet per mile, between 815 and 1,352 feet — 536 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 309 feet over 1.2 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 9.0%. By Driftless standards that is steep.

Surface, speed and traffic

Paved end to end. 90% of it is back road rather than highway, the other 10% state or US route. Posted speeds run to 60 mph, typically 60, measured across 16% of the route. Where traffic counts exist — 22% of the miles — the median is 355 vehicles a day, busiest at mile 0.0 with 3,614.

Where to stop

1 of the towns on this road has somewhere to stop — 3 food.

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