Day 6: Dwellingup to Lake Brockman

August 15, 2025

Maggie and I slept warmly in Hayley’s cabin and Jimmy also paid for a room but the others camped on the oval in town. It was frosty overnight. Noah didn’t even set up a tent just slept on the concrete in front of the tuck shop window and said he was toasty.

When we got down to the cafe, their tents were already drying on the lawn and they had all ordered breakfast. Luckily they had packed down their tents cause the leaf blowers came back before 8. You don’t get a town as clean as dwellingup without outlawing leaves.

I had a veggie wrap for breakfast and coffee, bought better chain lube and we all lined up for a creepy Polaroid to put on the cafe wall. Yesterday we measured Maggie against Noah so I had the idea of lining up tallest to shortest but the others made it weird.

There was quite a lot of faffing and chatting to Hayley and enjoying the charging points, warm cafe and toilets at dwellingup but we eventually rolled out about 9:30. There were some cute cafes further up the road too, so dwellingup was very hospitable, although apparently the free showers were not that great.

We got mildly confused heading out of town and then found some nice single track down a nice half forested valley. It was too cold to take any photos though, my full fingered gloves got their first outing since London.

After some nice downhill dirt roads we took a sharp left that I nearly missed and thought the others had cause I didn’t realise they were that far ahead of me. I waited for james and Maggie and we warmed up on a hill. We made a very silly error crossing a road being nearly at the lane pool reserve that added about 20 minutes but decided that backtracking was better than attempting a downhill mountain bike trail called mayhem.

Turns out the others had gone the right way and were enjoying the scenery at Dwaarlandjimup.

We regrouped and enjoyed the view of a lovely natural pool flowing into rapids. There’s a nice suspension bridge over the river that’s been built since the map Linda lent me was printed in 2009.

Lane pool - inviting but too cold for a swim

There’s a huge array of mountain bike paths on the side of dwellingup too so the trail was fun single track for a while before climbing up to an old railway. My favourite, and alongside the river!

All this meant it was quite late by the time we made it to Bidja Ngoulin hut for lunch. It was a nice enough hut but a bit weedy. We tried to have a quick lunch which worked reasonably well. I held up proceedings by filtering some water in case we didn’t make it to lake brockman.

Turns out that a lot of roads and forest have been resumed for bauxite mining since 2009 too so the route was quite different. We climbed a difficult pea gravel hill to get up to Nanga Road and opted to stay on it rather than the track immediately adjacent to it. It was a bit corrugated but we saw no cars. We came across the first tunnel under a bauxite haul road and continued on another minor road for a bit longer.

At the second or third tunnel Noah brought out his tim whistle and played a jig (or maybe a reel) in the good accoustics.

We cut across some mining land which was a bit unnerving to see signs saying “no entry except Munda Biddi cyclists” but we didn’t see any activity. The bauxite mining we did pass looked like a massive sandpit with huge diggers moving dirt around. We came onto another road in time for a big hill in lovely afternoon light.

I try not to take photos of people pushing up hills but the light was so good

The final stretch of trail was a bit brutal with pea gravel and sand and several trail obstacles. Noah sat on one tree to help us all over it, and it’s much easier to lift a bike over a tree with help I discovered.

At about 5 we made it to another road and decided to take the western side of lake brockman for easier access to the caravan park because the internet said their cafe was open til 6. It was lovely riding into the setting sun around the lake but when we got here at 5:30 we discovered the kitchen had closed at 2.

They were nice about letting us stay across two sites and charging us for one so we all took advantage of the showers and big camp kitchen. There seem to be some yobbos around tonight but hopefully they get tucked up warmly into bed soon.

Today's ride: 57 km (35 miles)
Total: 262 km (163 miles)

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