New Clarksville Levee bike route, Part One.

You're traveling by bicycle from New Albany to the area of the Clark Memorial (2nd Street) Bridge. How to get there? I've always taken the first part of the route described below, continued through Old Clarksville, and emerged either by Colgate or the Falls of the Ohio Park.

Thanks to the Greenway project, there's a new route in part, just recently opened. It is a paved, multi-use path atop the levee, and I'll document it in this and two additional posts.

Beginning the bike ride in downtown New Albany, you start by accessing the east side of the city. For me, that usually means riding Main to Silver, then left, then right on Main, or Elm all the way to Beharrell, then right, and then left onto what crosses Silver Creek and becomes Providence Way, which crosses Lewis & Clark and becomes North Clark Boulevard.

The railroad that formerly crossed N. Clark Boulevard at the Williams Bakery (above) was pulled up a few years ago. The stones are big and potentially painful for bicycle tires, so you may need to walk your bike under the Brown's Station Way overpass. It's only about a hundred yards until the start of the paved levee path. Here's the left hand view along the old rail bed. An elevated section of I-65 is barely visible on the horizon.

As noted, a right turn at Williams Bakery and one hundred yards of choppy, unpaved rail bed leads to the junction with the new paved path atop the levee. Clarksville's sewage treatment plant is to the left in the photo below, and just past it is Midway Park.

Ironically, to follow the old rail bed through the levee (below) is to return to New Albany, via the industrial devastation in the vicinity of Emery Crossing Road. You'd end up roughly where the Box and Basket factory used to stand, around 18th and East Street in NA. A mountain bike might make it, although I cannot vouch for the rail bridge over Silver Creek, just a stone's throw away from the trestle that eventually will carry the Greenway over the creek.

However, the view is better to head up the new pavement, gain the levee top, and proceed toward the Clark Cabin. After all, downtown Jeffersonville's the goal in this ride.

To be continued.