CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
Bridge views, state-park curves and a fast escape from the grid. 138 km round from Yonkers - plan on about 2 h 18 of riding. It goes by way of Bear Mountain Bridge and Cold Spring. Perkins Memorial Drive is the high point. It is a high-mountain day.
Palisades is where the river's western cliffs begin: a long wall of dark basalt rising some hundred metres above the Hudson, running north from the George Washington Bridge into Rockland County. The nearest fuel is in Yonkers across the river or in the towns of Bergen County, so fill the tank before you go.
Read the complete Palisades fuel gate write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Next is Perkins Memorial Drive.
Perkins Memorial Drive is a short, steep, winding road that climbs to the top of Bear Mountain, in the Hudson Highlands, about fifty miles north of New York City, and it is one of the best-known viewpoints in the region. At the summit, a stone tower built in the 1930s in memory of a conservationist and philanthropist, George Perkins, stands at about thirteen hundred feet, and from its top you can see the Hudson valley, the Catskills in the north and, on a very clear day, the skyline of Manhattan, forty miles to the south. The road is closed in winter, usually from late autumn to spring, and in icy conditions, so check before you go.
Read the complete Perkins Memorial Drive write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Perkins Memorial Drive comes up about 50 km into the recorded legs. Next is Bear Mountain Bridge.
The Bear Mountain Bridge, opened in 1924, was the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time of its construction and the first to span the Hudson south of Albany. It leaps across the river at its narrowest and deepest, between the steep granite flanks of Bear Mountain on the west and Anthony's Nose on the east, and the setting is dramatic: dark cliffs, a wide gleaming river, forested hills layered one behind the other. A toll is collected, and motorcycles pay like everyone else.
Read the complete Bear Mountain Bridge write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 59 km into the recorded legs you reach Bear Mountain Bridge. Next is Cold Spring food stop.
Cold Spring is the kind of Hudson river village that looks like a stage set, a single steep Main Street of antiques shops, cafés and brick storefronts running down to the river and a small bandstand on the waterfront. It has fewer than two thousand residents, and it fills each weekend with day-trippers from the city who arrive on the Metro-North train. Across the water rise the walls of West Point, and the Hudson narrows here between steep, wooded hills, a fjord-like stretch called the Highlands.
Read the complete Cold Spring food stop write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Somewhere to get off the bike, about 74 km into the recorded legs. Next is Back to Palisades.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Palisades fuel gate write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Back to Palisades. That is the ride.
Bear Mountain Bridge → Cold Spring food stop is the reward section in New York. Look through the bends, use legal pull-offs for photos and keep a little margin for tractors, cyclists and damp shade. The best ride here is smooth, not noisy.