The Driftless Area is the patch of the upper Midwest the ice sheets went around. No glacier ever came through to scrape it level, so the rivers kept cutting, and what is left is a country of ridge tops and coulees with the roads draped over it. ScenicCurves has 86 of those roads measured, scored and written up, with spoken turn-by-turn and a map that works with no signal at all.
Every arc of 30° or more is counted, mile by mile, off the road geometry itself. That number puts a road on a five-point scale, and the scale is what lets a rider pick a Sunday morning rather than read 86 descriptions. The corpus lands where a good region should: thin at both ends, thick in the middle.
The curviest of the lot is the Trempealeau–Dodge–Arcadia Loop at 2.16 corners a mile. The longest is the Mindoro Cut Loop, 73.5 miles round.
Ridge tops out of La Crosse, the coulees dropping away on both sides, and the Kickapoo behind Wildcat Mountain.
The Root River valley, the bluffs above Winona, and the Amish ridges around Harmony and Lanesboro.
The Upper Iowa and the Yellow River, the Mississippi overlooks at Lansing, and the Czech and Norwegian country inland.
32 counties, 51 towns on the map, and 99 places along the way worth knowing about — a millwright's dam, a church built by the people who farmed around it, the quarry a road was cut through.
You do not have to be at the trailhead. The app finds where you joined the road and which way you are pointing, and picks the instructions up from there. Pick a road from a motel car park and it counts you down to it first.
Roads, water, woodland and town names travel inside the page. No tiles to fetch, no account to sign into, nothing to go wrong in a coulee with one bar.
Both directions of every road, because a road ridden the other way is a different road. Two prompts per corner: one to set up, one at the turn.
99 of them, written from local sources and placed by the mile. They appear when you reach the thing they are about and stay put, to be read at the next stop sign.
Corners a mile, climb per mile, traffic counts, how much of it is county road, where the fuel is. Compare 86 roads in one table and pick one.
Give a road your own score once you have ridden it, and write down what the map got wrong — a closed bridge, a gravel detour, a road that belongs in here and is not.
Three routes, once, in full — every score, every note, the offline map. They do not renew.
All 86 roads, both directions, and everything added while the year runs.
The same, month to month, for a season of riding or a week of holiday.
Every road here is measured from map data: the corners counted off the geometry, the climb off the elevation model, the traffic off the state count sites, the surface and the fuel and food off what is mapped. That is what the numbers mean. What no map knows is the road this morning — the gravel a county laid last week, the bridge that is out, the frost in a north-facing corner. Ride it the way you would ride any road you have not seen before.
Browse all 86 roads — every route with its distance, curviness score, corner count and climb, by state: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa.
ScenicCurves