We had planned a weekend in Dwellingup and decided to head down early on Friday 14th October 2016 to check out the mountain bike trails.  We had two lined up that we had seen routes for in the Trail Forks app – Marrinup Trail and Turner Hill Trail.

We set off from Fremantle to the first destination which was the Turner Hill Trail.  This took around 1hour and 20mins although it was a little difficult to find at first.  I had used the feature in the Trail Forks app to get the GPS reference and use the Get Directions option.  This opens the route in your map application which was great until the last section where we started to doubt it, however it got us pretty close.

When we arrived at the car park the Western Australia MTB Orienteering were busy setting up a course so a good atmosphere with people starting to arrive.  The plan was to tackle the Main Loop Trail which is 11km and rated as an intermediate trail.  We are not advanced Mountain Bikers and would say more on the intermediate to beginner side for a lot of the challenges/obstacles.  Overall we really enjoyed this loop with lots of varied sections and usually the option for a bypass track on the more difficult challenges.  Where there is not a bypass track then the drop offs and jumps are pretty easy but really good fun.  When you reach one of the challenges you will normally see a ‘Caution’ sign so you can decide which route you are going to take.  There are also a few more advanced (black) sections on the way around which you can take if you are after something a bit more advanced, we did not take any of these!  The whole loop took us 1hour and 22mins and we were taking it easy and stopping for some photos etc.  Overall a fantastic loop and you could no doubt go around for a second helping if you still have the energy.  The other option is to do what we did and drive down the road for 10mins to take in the Marrinup Trail.

We stayed at the Turner Hill carpark for a spot of lunch and watched the MTB Orienteering starting to set off, looked like good fun.  Then a quick drive for around 10mins to the start of the Marrinup Trail.

The Marrinup Trail was quite easy to find near the old Prisoner of War camp, nobody else was around at the trail head and we set off on the 8km loop.  The trail is much easier than Turner Hill but still a really nice trail and does have a few jumps and harder sections which you can navigate around if you are just after some good smooth single track.  The predicted rain came as we were out on the trail but was not too bad in the forest.  The directions are not so great on this trail so using the Trail Forks app was really useful on a couple of occasions.  The loop took us 40 minutes but certainly worth a blast around.

https://www.strava.com/activities/744084686/embed/e4b58be4fd714a7d2b0d281b771b002cc1c41886

We then headed off to stay at Dwellingup Caravan Park for the weekend.  We had a chalet booked so a nice hot shower and then met our friends for Dinner at the Blue Wren Cafe, excellent food just make sure you are there before it closes at 19:00.

Dwellingup have an excellent website which has the mountain bike trails, accommodation and lots of other things to do over a weekend.  Click here to visit.  Also certainly worth downloading the Trail Forks app as we found it handy for finding the start to the rides as well as navigating on the trails.