Gravel Route Difficulty Guide

Locating a Kentucky gravel route nearest you is easy enough. See our gravel routes page or check out resources like gravelmap.com or dig into a resource like the Kentucky Department of Transportation's Rural and Secondary Road map.

Finding a route that is well suited to your riding ability can be more of a challenge. In an effort to provide you more of a detailed look of what you are getting yourself into, we've put together the following resource, which seeks to not only identify a route, but assign n overall difficulty rating of "Beginner", "Intermediate", or "Advanced", much like they do with MTB trail systems.

Notes: These ratings are not perfect, but are designed to give you a sense of the overall difficulty of a route, relative to other routes that we've ridden. Factors we considered included the riding surface (e.g. well maintained roads often make for a less technical ride) and the hilliness of a route (for this, we focused on the measurement of ft/mile, dividing the overall riding elevation for a ride by the number of miles, distance, and the percentage of the route that is unpaved. Also, be sure to check out the YouTube Video for a preview of what to expect!