Palouse Scenic Byway Loop: Colfax, Palouse and Steptoe Butte

The Palouse is riding country that photographs like nowhere else in America: 116 kilometres of loop road threading the green and gold loess hills between Colfax, the Victorian storefronts of the town of Palouse, the summit of Steptoe Butte — a 1,011-metre quartzite island with the whole wheat ocean in every direction — and Oakesdale’s towering wooden grain elevators. The roads are empty, straight-then-rolling, surfaced in good farm pavement; the traffic is combines in August. Ride it in late May for electric-green hills or September for harvest gold, and climb the butte’s spiral road late in the day when the shadows give the land its depth.