An afternoon adventure to Bendora Dam
A 40km return afternoon bike ride adventure through the Cotter Catchment reserve to Bendora Dam, along the undulating management roads and through a few creek crossings, vaguely following the Bendora Gravity Main pipeline.
I had been moping all morning about not doing anything on a day with such beautiful weather, so we decided to load the bikes up and go for a bit of a spin out in the Cotter Catchment. I didn't have much of a plan, other than we would head down Pipeline Road and see how far we get - To Bendora Dam if it was doable, otherwise we'd just turn around and head home.
The Cotter Catchment area is a very enjoyable place to spend time in, so the lack of a defined goal wasn't really an issue for an ad-hoc afternoon adventure.
We start at about 10AM, driving in as far as we could to park at a gate then unloading the bikes and heading down the hill. It's quite an undulating road, with descents and then some climbing - but it's a very well maintained fire trail so pretty easy riding with a few big climbs thrown in (there was one in particular that required walking up).
After reaching the road junction with Bendora Road (which is actually not where I'd intended to end up, but we must've missed a turnoff) we decided to push on to Bendora Dam - although, to be honest this was a bit of a slog to climb up from the Cotter River to the actual dam itself.
We had a bit of a break at the dam, then the plan was to ride back on the track on the other side of the river before rejoining the main road back to the car.
This track was cool, and it was a little less used than the main road which made it a bit more fun. There were a few creek crossings thrown in as well which are always exceptionally fun.
We didn't have to cross the creeks, but where's the fun in adventure if you don't go out of your way to find it?
Once we rejoined the main Pipeline Road, it was more or less a straight run (with undulations) back to the car. Overall a brilliant way to spend a Sunday afternoon - The area around the Cotter catchment is another one of those areas that I just love spending time in.