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Lower Wisconsin River Run
Lower Wisconsin River Run is 59.7 miles of loop riding through Grant and Iowa Counties in Wisconsin — Coulee Region, the coulees, ridge tops and river bluffs of south-west wisconsin. Moving time is about 75 minutes; allow 110 with stops — a half day. It is scored CS-2, Easy: 64 corners, 140° of turning per mile, 2,522 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.
- Curviness
- CS-2Easy · 1.07/mi
- Distance
- 59.7 mi75 min riding
- Corners
- 6442% sharp · Mixed
- Climbing
- 2,522 ft42 ft/mi · Hilly
- Shape
- LoopHalf day
- Roads
- 92% back road8% state or US route
- Traffic
- Not countedno state counts on these roads
- Speed limit
- Unpostedno posted limits recorded
About this road
The valley floor. Muscoda, Avoca and Blue River strung along the Lower Wisconsin, which runs 92.3 miles without a dam from Prairie du Sac to the Mississippi — the longest free-flowing stretch of river in the Midwest, with about 95,000 acres either side of it protected as the Lower Wisconsin State Riverway since 1989. The road does not stay on the flat — it works the terraces and the feet of the bluffs, and the climbing rates hilly. Ride it for the river rather than the corners.
How it rides
64 corners over 59.7 miles — 1.07 a mile, and 140° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-2, Easy on the five-point curviness scale. 42% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as mixed.
What it climbs
The road climbs 2,522 feet in total, 42 feet per mile, between 668 and 1,219 feet — 551 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 336 feet over 2 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 9.3%. For this country that is hilly.
Surface, speed and traffic
Paved end to end. 92% of it is back road rather than highway, the other 8% state or US route. No posted speed limits are recorded for these roads. State traffic counts cover only 4% of these miles, too little to put a number on, which is itself a fair sign of how quiet they are.
Where to stop
Nothing listed on this road yet. It passes 8 places and we have nothing listed in any of them. Some of these places are a church and a grain bin rather than a village. Carry what you need, and start with a full tank.
We would rather say a road has nothing on it than fill the space with a guess — a stop that is not there is worse than no stop at all when you are thirty miles from anywhere.
- Backroads
- Loop
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.