LA CROSSE AREA BICYCLE FESTIVAL!
AUGUST 31 – SEPT 3, 2018
ENJOY TWO-WHEELED BLISS THROUGH THE SCENIC VALLEYS OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER!
For eight years, the La Crosse Area Labor Day Bike Festival has brought you all kinds of rides for all kinds of riders. We have family-friendly neighborhood tours, ice-cream rides, mountain biking, live music, challenging road rides, gravel, trail, and so much more!
New on the 2018 schedule are the Gran Fondo and Gravel Enduro Series, optional fee-based events. These are collections of fun rides exploring gravel and road routes in the Driftless region. “Enduro” and “Gran Fondo” means that riders leave together on a neutral start, with several sections timed along the way. The Gravel Enduro Series includes two rides over Labor Day weekend, and a bonus recovery ride on Labor Day. The Gran Fondo will have two different rides on two days, with varying distances from 30-75 miles. Take your pick — join us on all of the rides, or on your pick of one or more.
Festival registration, most in-town rides, the Open Streets fair, and live music are FREE, while premium festival registration (with additional benefits, text-based weather updates, t-shirts and special goodies) is available. The Gravel Enduro Series and Gran Fondo are optional, fee-based events with timing and added benefits.
Most Guided Interest Rides are suitable for families, kids, and easy riding. They leave from Riverside Park at the designated time, make frequent stops, and have a leader and volunteers to shepherd the ride through the city.
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THE DRIFTLESS REGION
There’s something special about the place where Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa meet. We call it the Driftless Region, where the Ice Age glaciers left untouched a cyclist’s playground of bluffs, ravines, coulees and lowlands on both sides of the Mississippi river.The corrugated geography of the Driftless is overlaid with a network of smooth, low-traffic county byways, paved in the early-20th century “Good Roads” movement to connect dairy farmers with their markets. For much of the last decade, area cyclists and volunteers have worked with the La Crosse Area Convention and Visitor’s Bureau to build a library of routes, with a variety of lengths and difficulties offering excitement and challenges for all levels of riders.
Generally starting from the river valley cities of La Crosse, Onalaska, and La Crescent, these routes venture into the bluffs and coulees of the surrounding Driftless region. Some of these counties have been described by Bicycling magazine as “the perfect getaway,” and “cycling nirvana, the American Dairyland edition. ”
