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Lansing and the Waterville Coulees
Lansing and the Waterville Coulees is 33.2 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 47 minutes; allow 70 with stops — a half morning. It is scored CS-2, Easy: 42 corners, 123° of turning per mile, 1,686 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.
- Curviness
- CS-2Easy · 1.26/mi
- Distance
- 33.2 mi47 min riding
- Corners
- 4243% sharp · Mixed
- Climbing
- 1,686 ft51 ft/mi · Relentless
- Shape
- LoopHalf morning
- Roads
- Backroads100% county & local
- Traffic
- —no published counts
How it rides
42 corners over 33.2 miles — 1.26 a mile, and 123° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-2, Easy on the five-point curviness scale. 43% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as mixed.
What it climbs
The road climbs 1,686 feet in total, 51 feet per mile, between 622 and 1,256 feet — 634 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 547 feet over 3.3 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 7.1%. By Driftless standards that is relentless.
Surface, speed and traffic
84.6% 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.
- Backroads
- Loop
- River road
- Big climbs
Worth knowing
- 15% 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.