Up in the far reaches of Northern Washington, nearly bumping into Canada even, is a wonderful little backroad perfect for sport-touring.
Why, you might ask would you go all the way up there to ride good roads? One fine reason is there’s hardly any other traffic on them. 37 miles of rural 2-lane with only the occasional farm truck and a couple dozen deer to dodge.
Most of the time at least, that is the case.
Unfortunately, when I went through they’d torn out the middle 10 miles of the road down to the bedrock. I was rather glad that I had opted to keep the quasi-dual-sport tires on the strom as the clay-ey soil would not have been fun on sportbike tires like the previous summer’s Conti Road Attacks.
And it is a good road, don’t get me wrong. I had a lot of fun on it, but the locals don’t look too fondly upon riders going much over the 40-ish mph speed limit. And the deer really are plentiful and fearless.
And even better, contrary to some reports from various mapping solutions, this road is (or will be) completely paved from end to end once construction on that center section is done.
Fuel is a bit spotty on the north end of the highway, but there’s food, lodgings, and fuel in Colville.
And this ride is quite fantastic when paired with its natural counterpart of riding Route 25 up into Northport. In fact, it’s quite the hillclimb getting out of Northport on Aladdin Road. Very steep incline that will have smaller motors working overtime, but very cool tight corners in that stretch too.
County: Stevens County, Washington
Length: 37 miles
Towns: Spirit, Northport, Colville, Aladdin
Google Map: