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Great River Road: Winona to Brownsville

Great River Road: Winona to Brownsville is 39.7 miles of point-to-point riding through Winona and Houston Counties in Minnesota — Bluff Country, the Root River valley, the Mississippi bluffs and the ridge roads above them. Moving time is about 47 minutes; allow 70 with stops — a half morning. It is scored CS-3, Spirited: 55 corners, 159° of turning per mile, 1,492 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.

Curviness
CS-3Spirited · 1.38/mi
Distance
39.7 mi47 min riding
Corners
5551% sharp · Tight
Climbing
1,492 ft38 ft/mi · Rolling
Shape
Point-to-pointHalf morning
Roads
Backroads74% county & local
Traffic
1,070vehicles a day, median
Speed limit
65 mphtypically 55
Open this route in the app

How it rides

55 corners over 39.7 miles — 1.38 a mile, and 159° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-3, Spirited on the five-point curviness scale. 51% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as tight.

What it climbs

The road climbs 1,492 feet in total, 38 feet per mile, between 634 and 1,295 feet — 661 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 557 feet over 1.5 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 10.9%. By Driftless standards that is rolling.

Surface, speed and traffic

Paved end to end. 74% of it is back road rather than highway, the other 26% state or US route. Posted speeds run to 65 mph, typically 55, measured across 56% of the route. Where traffic counts exist — 33% of the miles — the median is 1,070 vehicles a day, busiest at mile 29.5 with 18,482.

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