Reviewed by Bruce Thompson

Let’s say you have just arrived in Madison and are wondering where the good rides are. Or you are an experienced Madison rider but find yourself in a sort of rut: it is time to try some new routes, to explore more of the countryside surrounding the city. For either bicyclist, the Madison Ridge and Valley Rides offers a solution.

The core of this guide is a set of forty maps of suggested bike loop routes in the Madison area. Most of the loops are between twenty and forty miles in length, although a few longer ones range up to seventy miles. Most routes are in Dane county, with a few in neighboring counties.

Accompanying each map is a page containing one or two cue sheets. This page also includes information on starting points, information on the starting point, a succinct summary of the terrain (for example “level and rolling hills”) and a paragraph summarizing the route and its attractions.

The author suggests that the map and cue sheet be photocopied back to back on the same sheet of paper. This advice is wise since the 8″ by 11″ spiral-bound, 110 page guide would be cumbersome to pack on a bike and would probably suffer a short life when subject to being stuffed into a bike pack.

Also included in the guide are nine strip maps showing “bicycle escape routes” leading from Madison to some of the rides outside the urban area.

Strip maps of the major trails in the area are included as well as a page describing these trails: the Military Ridge Trail, the Glacial Drumlin Trail (east to Lake Mills), the Sugar River Trail, the Badger Trail (south to Monroe), and the US 12 trail. As with the other maps in this guide, these are printed in black and white and are easy to read.

The guide’s introductory material includes a brief history of bicycling in the Madison area, a discussion of glaciers, some suggestion for safe riding, and a list of starting points with driving directions and whether they have restrooms, water, and shelter.

One theme that runs through the guide is the effect of glaciation on the terrain. The terminal moraine lies just to the west of Madison and two rides are deliberately designed to track the base of that terrain. Further west is the driftless (unglaciated) area, with the most challenging hills, particularly between the Military Ridge and Blue Mounds on the south and the Wisconsin River on the north. To the east is the area that was smoothed by the glaciers offering mostly level riding interrupted by drumlins, glacial river debris, and other glacial features. In a number of cases, the author suggests the glacial origin of the features the rider encounters.

This guide would be particularly useful to riders new to bicycling or to the Madison area, but it could also offer suggestions of new routes to experienced riders. It offers sufficient information for a rider to pick a route that fits his or her ambition and mood. The maps are sufficiently detailed to serve for navigating so long as the rider sticks with the route. I would suggest that the rider also carry a bicycle map of the area in case he or she decides to diverge from the suggested route because of weather or other reasons.

I do have one minor caveat as to the organization of the loop rides: they are organized alphabetically. I would prefer a geographical organizations, so that nearby rides are placed adjacent to each other in the guide.

Biographical Information on the book’s author: Francis Stanton is a Madison, Wisconsin cartographer and cyclist. Mr. Stanton has been producing maps for clients since the 1970′s, and has self-published several bicycling map sets for Southern Wisconsin and the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in bicycling event maps, including the Horribly Hilly Hundreds and The Wright Stuff Century in Wisconsin. He rides many miles every year commuting and touring the local back roads.

The suggested detour is to take Timber Lane to Mineral Point Rd, Mineral Point to Pioneer and Pioneer back to Old Sauk Rd.

Devils’ Lake State Park turns 100 this year, and it has a number of celebrations planned for the summer, including Old Fashioned Day on July 23 and an ice cream social and string band on August 28. Click the link above for more information about the park and activities in the area.

You can ride your bike in and around the park, but if you want to get a taste for bicycle touring and have a great destination, try the Devil’s Lake Download from Bikeverywhere. The download includes great back roads from Middleton (a western suburb of Madison) to the free Merrimac Ferry across Lake Wisconsin. The ferry ride takes 7 minutes to cross and bikes get on right away. From there you take a couple of more scenic back roads that pass through rolling hills and marshlands to the park entrance.

Don’t be fooled by the road into the park. Because of the talus slopes along the road, it appears to be flat or even slightly downhill, but you’ll be working hard because the road actually climbs at a decent grade.

If you have the time and energy, continue north to Baraboo, home of Circus World Museum. The route is included in the download.

My original plan was to ride the Mountain Bay Trail from Wausau, Wisconsin to Green Bay, but that changed a couple of weeks ago when I had the chance to test ride the eastern end of the trail. The ride began at the end of an all day rain. The first thirty miles were on paved road, then I jumped on the trail. It took only a couple of meters for me to realize that my speed on the trail would be permanently reduced from about 16 mph to 11 mph, and even that reduced speed required a substantial increase in effort. The trail in this area, near Shawano, looks and feels like a jeep trail with two narrow tracks, soft wet gravel and occasional puddles. I turned off at the first cross road that went in the direction I was heading.

Wisconsin has an extensive network of paved back roads, some of them with as little as 50 cars per day, or one every half hour. Central Wisconsin was flattened 10,000 years ago by glaciers, so the road system is pretty much in a grid. With a resource like that, all I had to do to get to my destination was ride generally northwest by going first north, then west and making my turns almost at random until I neared my destination. For me this is the essence of bicycle touring- to get from Point A to Point B, but not necessarily in a straight line. I look forward to a week of similar meanderings.

We’ve added Sun Prairie to the urban side of the map, making it much easier to follow the connections between this nearby suburb and the urban center. We’ve also cleaned up the graphics, changed some of the map symbols and generally made the map easier to use.

This is the third edition of the Madison and Dane County Bike Map and it keeps evolving to meet the needs of Madison area cyclists. Some things, however, haven’t changed. We’ve kept the popular tear and water resistant paper. It will hold up to the most rugged daily use, stay fresh in your panniers or jersey pocket and show you the way home even in a drenching downpour.

We’ve also maintained the focus on field research and user needs when evaluating bike routes for inclusion in the map. Roads that don’t meet our standards have been eliminated and new routes developed. New and expanded trails have been added. The transitions from the urban side of the map to the rural county roads are easy to follow and every road or trail leads somewhere. The Madison and Dane County Bike map won’t abandon you on a road that suddenly turns ugly.

The new Madison and Dane County Bike Map is available at bike shops and bookstores throughout the county, or you can buy it online here at bikeverywhere.com

For discussions of the overall project click here for the US Department of Transportation and here for Adventure Cycling. It appears from a map of the proposed system that the proposed Wisconsin segment is part of proposed route 30, which will run west through Minneapolis to beyond Billings and east, after cross the lake, to Detroit.

A number of states, particularly in the Northeast now have marked and numbered long-distance bicycle routes. In the 1970s, Wisconsin pioneered with two routes, one from LaCrosse to Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha, and the second running north from LaCrosse to Lake Superior. At some point these routes were abandoned as attention turned more to developing bike trails, particularly on abandoned railroad lines.

Another national publication, Adventure Cycling, featured Trempealeau County, along the Mississippi River as another cyclist’s destination.