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Beaver Creek and the Caledonia Ridges
Beaver Creek and the Caledonia Ridges is 54.7 miles of loop riding through Houston County in Minnesota — Bluff Country, the Root River valley, the Mississippi bluffs and the ridge roads above them. Moving time is about 69 minutes; allow 100 with stops — a half day. It is scored CS-3, Spirited: 78 corners, 116° of turning per mile, 2,737 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.
- Curviness
- CS-3Spirited · 1.43/mi
- Distance
- 54.7 mi69 min riding
- Corners
- 7838% sharp · Sweeping
- Climbing
- 2,737 ft50 ft/mi · Relentless
- Shape
- LoopHalf day
- Roads
- Backroads100% county & local
- Traffic
- 598vehicles a day, median
- Speed limit
- 60 mphtypically 55
How it rides
78 corners over 54.7 miles — 1.43 a mile, and 116° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-3, Spirited 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 2,737 feet in total, 50 feet per mile, between 691 and 1,336 feet — 645 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 387 feet over 3.3 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 8.5%. By Driftless standards that is relentless.
Surface, speed and traffic
Paved end to end. 100% of it is back road rather than highway. Posted speeds run to 60 mph, typically 55, measured across 32% of the route. Where traffic counts exist — 19% of the miles — the median is 598 vehicles a day, busiest at mile 0.0 with 5,860.
- Backroads
- Loop
- Big climbs
- Low traffic
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.