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Darlington Truman

Darlington Truman is 17.3 miles of loop riding through Lafayette County in Wisconsin — The Dells Region, the baraboo hills, the lower wisconsin river and the ridge roads between reedsburg and spring green. Moving time is about 20 minutes; allow 30 with stops — a quick spin. It is scored CS-1, Cruiser: 16 corners, 120° of turning per mile, 1,032 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.

Curviness
CS-1Cruiser · 0.93/mi
Distance
17.3 mi20 min riding
Corners
1650% sharp · Tight
Climbing
1,032 ft60 ft/mi · Relentless
Shape
LoopQuick spin
Roads
100% back road0% state or US route
Traffic
Not countedno state counts on these roads
Speed limit
Unpostedno posted limits recorded
Open this route in the app

About this road

Seventeen miles of county road around Darlington, and the steepest per-mile climbing of the four routes added here: sixty feet for every mile, on CTH F, CTH Z and CTH O through the Pecatonica valley and the ridges above it. Darlington is worth the stop for one building. The Lafayette County Courthouse was begun in 1905 to a design by Kinney and Detweiler of Minneapolis, neoclassical, with a cupola of Ionic columns and clock faces rising from the hipped roof and a skylight carrying daylight down into the building. It cost more than $136,000, and all of it came from one man: Matt Murphy, last trustee of a fund raised for Civil War widows, turned that fund to the courthouse and left the county seventy per cent of his estate besides. It is the only county courthouse in the United States paid for entirely by a single person, and it has been on the National Register since 1978.

How it rides

16 corners over 17.3 miles — 0.93 a mile, and 120° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-1, Cruiser on the five-point curviness scale. 50% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as tight.

What it climbs

The road climbs 1,032 feet in total, 60 feet per mile, between 819 and 1,057 feet — 238 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 179 feet over 0.8 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 7.7%. For this country that is relentless.

Surface, speed and traffic

Paved end to end. 100% of it is back road rather than highway, the other 0% state or US route. No posted speed limits are recorded for these roads. State traffic counts cover only 3% of these miles, too little to put a number on, which is itself a fair sign of how quiet they are.

Turn-by-turn directions and the spoken guidance 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