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Fayette Calamine
Fayette Calamine is 17.4 miles of loop riding through Lafayette and Iowa Counties 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, 121° of turning per mile, 884 feet of climbing. The roads it uses, in the order you ride them, are in the app.
- Curviness
- CS-1Cruiser · 0.92/mi
- Distance
- 17.4 mi20 min riding
- Corners
- 1662% sharp · Tight
- Climbing
- 884 ft51 ft/mi · Relentless
- Shape
- LoopQuick spin
- Roads
- 71% back road29% state or US route
- Traffic
- Not countedno state counts on these roads
- Speed limit
- Unpostedno posted limits recorded
About this road
Short, steep and almost entirely empty. The loop works the hollows between Fayette and Calamine on Furnace Hill Road, Fort Defiance Road and a few miles of WI 23, and in seventeen miles it asks for fifty-one feet of climbing per mile — relentless by the corpus measure, and the reason a short ride here does not feel short. Calamine sits in the town of Willow Springs at 889 feet, on the Pecatonica River, and the Cheese Country Trail runs through it on the old railbed. It was a busier place once, with working mines and farms around it; the one-room schoolhouse beside the church took pupils until 1961, and cattle trains out of Texas were still unloading here into the 1960s. The road names are the plainest guide to the country: furnace, hollow, defiance.
How it rides
16 corners over 17.4 miles — 0.92 a mile, and 121° of turning for every mile ridden. That scores CS-1, Cruiser on the five-point curviness scale. 62% of those corners are sharp ones, and the road reads as tight.
What it climbs
The road climbs 884 feet in total, 51 feet per mile, between 878 and 1,109 feet — 231 feet of relief. The longest single climb is 84 feet over 0.5 miles, and the steepest grade on it is 5.9%. For this country that is relentless.
Surface, speed and traffic
Paved end to end. 71% of it is back road rather than highway, the other 29% state or US route. No posted speed limits are recorded for these roads. State traffic counts cover only 4% of these miles, too little to put a number on, which is itself a fair sign of how quiet they are.
- Backroads
- Loop
- Big climbing
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.