*Motorcycle Roads NorthWest

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:

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Now, don’t act all surprised that I’ve posted yet another old highway alignment. This one however is rather nice and much twistier than the parallel Interstate 90 a few miles to the south.

This one is quite a bit of fun, actually. It winds along the valleys that lead down to the Columbia River and passes some rock quarries and a large windmill installation on the north side of the road.

There’s lot of fun to be had on this expanse of lightly-traveled chipseal, but apparently there’s been a number of accidents as well. Some WSDOT pages I’ve seen indicate that this road has been designated a “Safety Corridor” so it would be wise to keep your speed down to a reasonable level and keep an eye out for other traffic in additional to one’s usual vigilance for law enforcement.

Columbia River Photos, near Vantage:

Photo by Jami Dwyer (CC: AT)

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This is a truly fantastic road.

On one end of the road, you have a fairly well-maintained US Highway (US Route 12), and on the other you have one of the Snake River’s more fascinating civil engineering projects, the Lower Granite Dam.

The Kirby-Mayview Road departs US 12 at an acutely-angled intersection a few miles east of Pomeroy. If you’re coming in from Pomeroy, it’s very easy to see and just takes a quick head-check to the east for oncoming traffic and it’s into Sweeper Heaven.
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Washington State Route 142 is one of those odd little rural highways that were carved out of the native landscape to serve some of the small and medium sized town in the area.

The section from Goldendale to the first set of twisties is about 8 miles long, but once you’ve got the straight section done, you’ll find an enjoyable series of sweepers that run nearly uninterrupted all the way down to the Columbia. This is a great little road to run in conjunction with the Mabton-Bickleton-Goldendale Highway if you’re heading over to the Hanson Project or the Yakima/Ellensburg area and aren’t in a vast hurry.

Photos near and along Route 142:

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Ok, I’ll admit it. The twisty quotient on Washington Route 14 has a bit of a tendency to be less than stunning once you’re east of the Cascades. It definitely drops down to high-speed sweepers east of Stevenson, but this road might provide a wee bit of welcome diversion if you’re not in an all-fired hurry.

And yes, it’s a much shorter road than most of my listings. It’s a sub-road really, but one that I really enjoyed.

It’s also known by a handful of various names it seems. My Gazetteer called it “Old Highway 8″. GoogleMaps calls it “Lyle White Salmon Road” and “Old Highway” and switching to “Canyon Road” on the eastern end.

A lot of names for such a small road. The views from up top are anything but small though, and the corners are tricky and banked. Highway engineers don’t really seem to like banked curves that much anymore, but this old road still has them where it threads in between a stone formation and a bounder perched atop the edge of the ridge.

View from nearby:

(courtesy of Joe Goldberg. Creative Commons: Attribution–Share Alike)
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