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Yellow River and the Volney Coulees
Yellow River and the Volney Coulees is 40.9 miles of point-to-point 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-4, Twisty: 77 corners, 149° of turning per mile, 2,621 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.
- Curviness
- CS-4Twisty · 1.88/mi
- Distance
- 40.9 mi53 min riding
- Corners
- 7738% sharp · Sweeping
- Climbing
- 2,621 ft64 ft/mi · Relentless
- Shape
- Point-to-pointHalf morning
- Roads
- Backroads100% county & local
- Traffic
- —no published counts
How it rides
77 corners over 40.9 miles — 1.88 a mile, and 149° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-4, Twisty on the five-point curviness scale. 38% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as sweeping.
What it climbs
The road climbs 2,621 feet in total, 64 feet per mile, between 620 and 1,210 feet — 590 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 431 feet over 1.9 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 8.0%. By Driftless standards that is relentless.
Surface, speed and traffic
95.1% 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
- One way
- Big climbs
Worth knowing
- 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.