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Mississippi Overlooks: McGregor to Harpers Ferry

Mississippi Overlooks: McGregor to Harpers Ferry is 16.5 miles of point-to-point riding through Clayton and Allamakee Counties in Iowa — Driftless Iowa, the Upper Iowa, the Yellow River country and the climbs out of the Mississippi. Moving time is about 22 minutes; allow 30 with stops — a quick spin. It is scored CS-2, Easy: 17 corners, 116° of turning per mile, 1,094 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.

Curviness
CS-2Easy · 1.03/mi
Distance
16.5 mi22 min riding
Corners
1741% sharp · Mixed
Climbing
1,094 ft66 ft/mi · Relentless
Shape
Point-to-pointQuick spin
Roads
Backroads93% county & local
Traffic
—no published counts
Speed limit
45 mphtypically 45
Open this route in the app

How it rides

17 corners over 16.5 miles — 1.03 a mile, and 116° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-2, Easy 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 1,094 feet in total, 66 feet per mile, between 624 and 1,128 feet — 503 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 485 feet over 1.7 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 9.4%. By Driftless standards that is relentless.

Surface, speed and traffic

73.0% paved — the rest is gravel or seal coat, so check the surface before you commit. 93% of it is back road rather than highway, the other 7% state or US route. Posted speeds run to 45 mph, typically 45, measured across 2% of the route. No published traffic counts cover this route, so it carries no traffic figure rather than a borrowed one.

Worth knowing

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.

Nearby roads