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Dorchester and the Northern Ridges
Dorchester and the Northern Ridges is 38.2 miles of loop riding through Allamakee County in Iowa — Driftless Iowa, the Upper Iowa, the Yellow River country and the climbs out of the Mississippi. Moving time is about 53 minutes; allow 75 with stops — a half morning. It is scored CS-5, Technical: 74 corners, 158° of turning per mile, 1,976 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.
- Curviness
- CS-5Technical · 1.94/mi
- Distance
- 38.2 mi53 min riding
- Corners
- 7441% sharp · Mixed
- Climbing
- 1,976 ft52 ft/mi · Relentless
- Shape
- LoopHalf morning
- Roads
- Backroads100% county & local
- Traffic
- —no published counts
How it rides
74 corners over 38.2 miles — 1.94 a mile, and 158° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-5, Technical on the five-point curviness scale. 41% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as mixed.
What it climbs
The road climbs 1,976 feet in total, 52 feet per mile, between 673 and 1,319 feet — 646 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 460 feet over 3.9 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 9.6%. By Driftless standards that is relentless.
Surface, speed and traffic
88.2% paved — the rest is gravel or seal coat, so check the surface before you commit. 100% of it is back road rather than highway. No published traffic counts cover this route, so it carries no traffic figure rather than a borrowed one.
- Sport ride
- Backroads
- Loop
- Big climbs
Worth knowing
- 12% unverified surface
- Fuel sparse — top off before you go
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.