I have now ridden every public roadway in Lewis County. Although I have lived here for 25 years (having first moved to Canton in 1999), I’ve been riding mostly the same the local highways and byways. This project began in 2023. Once I decided to ride the whole county, I determined very quickly that I had already ridden most of the paved roads, so I got a gravel bike (Poseidon Redwood) to handle the rest. Lewis County has LOTS of gravel roads. Later that gravel bike began to feel inadequate, and I upgraded to a better one, a Cannondale Topstone 2. Other bikes I used over the years included a Univega rigid mountain bike, a Trek hardtail mountain bike, a Litespeed titanium road bike, a Fuji road bike, a Kestrel carbon fiber road bike, a Motobecane fat tire bike, and a Univega tandem.
Gravel has a lot more rolling resistance than pavement, so I only rode half the distance I would normally ride, like 20 or 30 miles instead of 40 or 60. The roads vary from nice, packed earth to big, chunky cobbles. Sometimes there were muddy stretches, big ruts or potholes, but they were not a problem unless I was screaming downhill at high speed. Traction was always a concern, as it’s easy to slide on gravel. My only crash was while turning at low speed on gravel. My front tire slid out and I went down. Fortunately, my gloves and arm sleeves protected me and I only got a mild scrape. Mechanical failures included the sole coming off my shoe and a pedal coming apart. I kept getting flats with my first set of tires (WTB brand) on the Poseidon, and switched them out for a set of Schwalbes. Never had a flat after that. These rides are always hard, but they are great training for the bike tours I do each summer, such as the Big BAM and RAGBRAI.
To keep track of my rides, I used primarily two digital tools. I used the Strava app to record my rides, and downloaded a gpx file of my path from that. I uploaded the gpx file to a website, gpx.studio, to examine the routes I’d already ridden. It displays them all at once, and I could plan the next route. I rode much of the southwest corner and middle of the county just by taking rides from home. The southeast corner I completed by having Stacey drop me off in Quincy when she went to work, and riding home via indirect routes. For the northwest corner I drove to La Belle, Williamstown, Monticello or Deer Ridge to park and ride. For the northeast corner I mostly parked in Canton.
One curious thing happened fairly often: I planned a route, only to find during the ride that a road, or parts of it, no longer existed. Many of the county roads have been converted to private ones or even to fields. I also found a few new roads that did not appear on the maps. Our maps, especially those available online, are out of date. I had to make some changes to my routes on these days, sometimes with considerable frustration if a loop was interrupted.
Lewis County is only 511 square miles in area, unlike the huge counties in western states, and doesn’t contain any large cities, making the project fairly tractable. There are approximately 1000 miles of roadway. Of course, many roads had to be ridden multiple times to reach the unridden roads, and all dead end roads had to be ridden down and back. In the cities and towns, I criss-crossed east-west and north-south to get all of the streets and alleys done. It took almost 1900 miles of riding to complete it.
I did some bonus routes that were not public roads, such as all of the trails at Wakonda State Park, a couple of mountain bike rides on the trails at Deer Ridge, and the roads through about every cemetery that I passed. I rode the levy trail in Canton and all the trails on our farm. The only road I did not complete was Highway 61. I had to ride a few short segments of it for some rides, but it feels too dangerous to try to do the whole thing. Trucks flying by at 70 mph are not fun for the cyclist.
It was an arbitrary goal to ride all the county roads, but it gave me motivation to ride, and let me see a lot of the region. I declared it like a New Year’s resolution, but I knew it would take more than one year. I thought I might conceivably get it done in two, but I’d have to work at it. I finished a couple of months short of two years.
The gravel roads get very little traffic, so they are safer than many paved highways. The only traffic I saw were friendly farmers and their families. I was been chased by many dogs, but never caught. If a dog looked friendly, I stopped and made friends with it. If it looked slow, I outran it.
The scenery was great while cycling the countryside. It was peaceful and there was a lot of wildlife. I saw a deer on almost every ride. I’ve seen uncountable bald eagles, snakes, turkeys and all the typical wildlife. I’ve seen a lot of the rarely observed species too, such as river otters, western kingbirds, and bobolinks. Roadsides are also a great place to see wildflowers, such as spiderwort, blazing star, sensitive briar and wild petunia.
