Random Road Trip Generator

How this random road trip generator works

Press Generate and you get a road and where it goes. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

The Pacific Coast Highway. The Ring Road. Trollstigen. The Death Road. The Guoliang Tunnel Road, which runs through the side of a Chinese cliff.

Press it in January and it will offer you a road that is under two metres of snow, with exactly the same cheerfulness as it offers you one in August. That is worth understanding before you book anything.

A mountain pass is a road with a season

Stelvio. Furka. Grimsel. Gotthard. San Bernardino. Arlberg. Vršič. Tioga. Rohtang. Transfăgărășan. Trollstigen. Going-to-the-Sun Road. Grossglockner. The Sani Pass. Tizi-n-Test. Conor Pass. The Llanberis Pass.

Every one of them is a road that exists in summer.

A pass is a low point in a ridge, which means it is also the place where snow collects and stays. Nobody clears it in winter, because clearing it in winter would mean clearing it again tomorrow. So a gate goes across it in autumn and comes off in spring, and the road spends half its life as a route that a map still draws and a car cannot use.

Rockfall closes them too, without warning and sometimes for years. Freeze and thaw work at the pavement all winter, and what emerges in May is not always what went under in November.

None of this appears on any list of great drives, because a list has no calendar.

Nine thousand nine hundred and forty-three feet

Tioga Pass is the highest paved crossing of the Sierra Nevada, at 9,943 feet, and it is the only road into Yosemite from the east. The road was completed in 1915 and paved in 1937.

The National Park Service has kept the opening and closing dates since 1933, and they make the point better than any argument could.

Across those records the pass has opened, on average, on 28 May, and closed on 3 November. Plowing begins around the middle of April, and takes as long as it takes.

But the average conceals the thing that matters. In 2023, after a winter that dumped more than double the usual snowpack, the pass did not open until 22 July, the latest date in the whole recorded history of the road. Two years later it opened in the middle of May.

So the honest answer to "when does Tioga Pass open" is that nobody knows in advance, including the people with the plows. It depends on the snowpack on the first of April, and on how warm the spring turns out to be, and on whether the freeze cracked the road.

Every alpine road in the world runs on the same arithmetic. The Sierra Nevada simply happens to have written it down for ninety years.

Highway 61 is two different drives

One road can be two road trips, and Highway 61 is the clearest case.

In Minnesota it runs up the north shore of Lake Superior: cold water, basalt cliffs, birch. A thousand miles south it runs through the Mississippi Delta, which is flat, hot, and the birthplace of a musical form.

Same number. Same highway, in the sense that a highway is a line an authority has numbered. Nothing whatsoever in common besides.

Which is a useful thing to remember about any road on any list. A road is not one place. It is a decision somebody made about where a line should go, and the line usually passes through several countries' worth of scenery on its way to somewhere it was built to reach.

Check the road, and check the year

Roughly nine in ten of these drives are roads you can point a car at today. The rest have a gate on them for part of every year.

Before you commit to anything, look up the specific road, and look it up for this year. A pass that opened in May last year may not open until July this one. A road closed by a landslide can stay closed for two seasons while engineers decide whether the hillside above it is finished moving.

The national park services, the Alpine road authorities and the Norwegian roads administration all publish live status. They are the only sources that are ever current, and they are all free.

Ways people actually use this

• Deciding where to go. Generate five. Discard the ones you have heard of. Look up the rest.
• Deciding when to go. Read the section above first.
• Writing. Every entry is a real road with a real reason somebody built it, and the reason is usually stranger than the view.
• Arguing. The list has opinions. It thinks the Amalfi Coast is a road trip and the M1 is not.
• Bragging. Generate twenty and count how many you have driven. Six is a good score.

Getting more out of the filters

• Entries read "Road: Place", so Contains works as a country filter. Try Norway, Iceland, Scotland, USA.
• Type Pass to gather most of the seasonal roads. Trollstigen, Tioga, Transfagarasan and Going-to-the-Sun are passes without the word.
• Type Coast, Highway, Parkway or Trail to sort by what kind of road it is, which is also a way of sorting by what kind of country built it.
• Starts with and Ends with compare a single character. Give them one letter, not a word.

Questions people ask

Are these roads open all year?

Many are not. The mountain passes shut for part of every year, some for most of it. Snow, avalanche risk and rockfall all close them, and the opening dates move from year to year. Always check the specific road before travelling.

When does Tioga Pass open?

On average, 28 May, closing around 3 November. But it opened on 22 July in 2023, the latest in the recorded history of the road, and in mid-May two years later. It depends entirely on the snowpack.

Why are mountain passes closed in winter?

Because a pass is a low point in a ridge, which is exactly where snow collects. Clearing one in midwinter would mean clearing it again the next day, so a gate goes across it in autumn instead.

Why does Highway 61 appear twice?

Because it is one highway running most of the length of the United States. The Minnesota stretch along Lake Superior and the Mississippi Delta stretch are entirely different drives, a thousand miles apart.

How far ahead can I plan an alpine drive?

Not as far as you would like. Road crews begin plowing in mid-April and finish when the snow lets them. The only reliable source is the road authority's own live status page, checked in the week you travel.

References

1. Tioga and Glacier Point Roads, plowing and road opening, National Park Service
2. Tioga and Glacier Point Roads opening and closing dates
3. Tioga Pass Road opening and closing dates since 1933