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Cresco to Decorah the Long Way
Cresco to Decorah the Long Way is 38.7 miles of point-to-point riding through Howard and Winneshiek Counties in Iowa — Driftless Iowa, the Upper Iowa, the Yellow River country and the climbs out of the Mississippi. Moving time is about 49 minutes; allow 70 with stops — a half morning. It is scored CS-4, Twisty: 66 corners, 145° of turning per mile, 1,879 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.
- Curviness
- CS-4Twisty · 1.71/mi
- Distance
- 38.7 mi49 min riding
- Corners
- 6653% sharp · Tight
- Climbing
- 1,879 ft49 ft/mi · Steep
- Shape
- Point-to-pointHalf morning
- Roads
- Backroads94% county & local
- Traffic
- —no published counts
- Speed limit
- 55 mphtypically 55
How it rides
66 corners over 38.7 miles — 1.71 a mile, and 145° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-4, Twisty on the five-point curviness scale. 53% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as tight.
What it climbs
The road climbs 1,879 feet in total, 49 feet per mile, between 833 and 1,302 feet — 469 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 280 feet over 1.5 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 9.0%. By Driftless standards that is steep.
Surface, speed and traffic
92.2% paved — the rest is gravel or seal coat, so check the surface before you commit. 94% of it is back road rather than highway, the other 6% state or US route. Posted speeds run to 55 mph, typically 55, measured across 45% of the route. No published traffic counts cover this route, so it carries no traffic figure rather than a borrowed one.
- Sport ride
- Backroads
- One way
Worth knowing
- 8% unverified surface
Turn-by-turn directions and the spoken notes along the way 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.