Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Perhaps the strangest thing about this year’s RAGBRAI route map release, now that the day-by-day trickle is an established thing, is that the Register‘s website didn’t really say anything about it. On that Sunday morning, there was nothing except the link inside “Quick Links” that’s always there. The daily maps, not a unified map, are in the March 24 Register.

This year’s ride is billed as the eighth-easiest, sixth-shortest and eighth-flattest. Many recent rides have been billed as among the top 10 easiest ever despite nearly 50 years of data points to work with.

After very infrequent visits from RAGBRAI, southern Des Moines County and Lee County get some serious love the last day and a half of RAGBRAI XLVII. From about midday Friday to the end Saturday, the ride is exclusively in those two counties, and for the first time Burlington is not an endpoint but an overnight city.

• The route passes through 40 incorporated places, plus one on a loop.
• Never been on the route before: McClelland (gravel loop), Spring Hill (not shown on the dailies, but on R57 south of Norwalk), Liberty Center (unincorporated), Douds-Leando (unincorporated), Libertyville, and Franklin.
• Long droughts (25-plus) over: Avoca (1976), Marne (mainline 1986, loop 2001), Menlo (1991), Dexter (1991), Earlham (1991)
• Monday’s route is an exact duplicate of 1991, minus a loop, and the first time since then to follow former IA 925 (White Pole Road).
• Segments that have never been used on RAGBRAI before:
  • L34 between G8L (old IA 191) and G30
  • US 169 and a smidgen of G4R leaving Winterset, and R57/IA 92 between Norwalk and Indianola
  • R63, Nevada Street, 118th Avenue, G58, and US 65 from Indianola to Liberty Center via Lake Ahquabi State Park (the longest segment of US 65 ever allowed)
  • IA 2 from Centerville to Bloomfield, and V64/H43 from an intersection labeled Lebanon on the RAGBRAI map (it’s a church and a tiny store) from J40 to Fairfield. This might make up a little for 2019 being a total overlap of 2009 between Lacona and the south side of Lake Rathbun.
  • 280th Avenue/160th Street between IA 16 and Geode State Park (paved, but without a county road designation)
  • J48 between X32 and J40, J56/W78/IA 2 from near West Point to Donnellson, and US 218 from IA 27 to near Montrose
• Don’t be fooled on Wednesday’s stretch: There’s nothing between Millerton (which, itself, is only 45 people) and Mystic. Bethlehem is a church, Confidence is a church, and Walnut City is an abandoned church. But riders may remember that from 2016, which duplicated the second half of this route from Millerton to Centerville including the loop around Lake Rathbun.
• The 30-ish miles from the junction of IA 16 and 280th Street to Burlington late Friday is repeated early Saturday, representing the first major backtracking on a ride since back and forth through Stockport in 1997 (incidentally, the same overlap from then is how Friday starts). There was a minor backtracking last year in/out of Iowa City on W66.
• You can’t get from US 218 to Montrose without using Peach Orchard Road (2.5 miles of blacktop), 300th Street (a mile of gravel between discontinuous segments of J72), or US 61 (0.7 miles of four-lane that would cause big traffic tie-ups). The map isn’t detailed enough to tell me exactly how that problem is solved. In 1992 it looks like they used the gravel.
• The way out of Montrose is on the Great River Road, which had a rockslide-induced closure in 2015. Riders will wrap up the last day going past a replica of the first schoolhouse in Iowa and the monument to Chief Keokuk.

My year-by-year city list has been updated.