*Motorcycle Roads NorthWest

Located just outside of Culdesac Idaho is one of the neat little roads tucked away up on the hilltops of northern Idaho.

It’s an amazing old road, with emphasis on Old and a double word bonus of Narrow. The road is barely the width of one and a half lanes of a modern roadway, and this one doesn’t have anything that I’d call a shoulder.

The curves are very tight and typical of Idaho, the shoulder gravel is the same color as the roadway as it’s paved with local stone. Most of the curves are very tight: most of the outside curves have no guiderail to demarcate the outside edges and the ‘inside corners’ have oncoming traffic is usually coming across the inside of your lane.

It’s a great road though and the vista is well worth the trip, not only from the top but also from many points along the way up.

This is the wide section.

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I know a bunch of folks say these roads are boring. And I can’t argue that if you don’t enjoy open countrysides, the scenery isn’t much to write home about.

One thing this stretch of 206 offers is fast and lonely sweepers. Well, lonely if you don’t count the occasional deer in the fields and the numerable ground squirrels living along the verge of the road. At one point along the plateau a dozen miles SW of Heppner, I was seeing a squirrel scurry in front of me every easily hundred yards.

It’s fast and lonely though. Not hardly another soul on the road to hold things up. And when you do see a car coming the other way, they’re usually waving to you.

Canyon corners between Condon and Heppner:

Most notably, it also offers several sets of fantastic twisties with a canyon-edge hairpins every 10 minutes or so between Heppner and Condon. The curves really are great and there’s so little traffic that the chip-seal doesn’t get polished. The traction was simply amazing on the rural Oregon roads. It has really spoiled me for riding in Washington.

Wind farm just west of Condon:

Yeah, I was too busy strafing the curves to stop for photos in the middle.

Regarding services, it’s better than most roads in Central Oregon. There’s fuel in Heppner, Condon, and all along the I-84 freeway. There’s a little biker-friendly hotel in both Condon and in Heppner, and camping outside of Heppner on Willow Creek Road.

In between? Well, there’s not much but a couple semi-abandoned hamlets, much twisty road, and many deer.

• Counties: Gilliam and Morrow
• Length: 43 miles
• Towns: Heppner, Condon

Google Map for Oregon State Route 206 from Heppner to Condon:

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I must say that I’ve kind of fallen in love with the sweeper roads of North Central Idaho. The roads gently weave in between the rolling hills of trees and fields, with an occasional village with a gas station and market, with hardly any other vehicular traffic out on the road.

This particular road is perfect for a relaxing 50-60mph cruise back to your hotel in the afternoon. You just need to watch out for the extremely high concentrations of elk and whitetail deer in this area though.

One good friend got hit by a guided missile of the hooved rat variety. Bambi got her check paid in full, and said friend ended up with a seriously smashed up tourer and some well-used riding gear.

Route 8, West of Elk River

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This road is one of those little country roads that ends up being curvy by virtue of the fact that it has to go in between existing farms, and it’s conveniently situated to go over to the town in the next valley. It’s a tableau full of sweepers, executed in chipseal with excess-gravel shoulder, but otherwise it’s a good grippy surface without much in the way of heave or buckling and no tar snakes.

One note of concern for sportbike riders and newbies: East of Lenville Road, this road is gravel. You’ll get up to a fork in the road: on the left is the Lenville road which is gravel, and on the right is the continuation of Genesee-Juliaetta Road which turns to gravel shortly after the bridge.

I was in a bit of a hurry so I did not do the entire gravel section, but the section I did was quite washboardy.

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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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