OFF16 Upstream on Argeș river

February 2020. It should be the middle of winter but outside is kind of spring. Today it is announced that the temperature will rise to 16-17 degrees so I will go with the motorcycle to search offroad routes around Bucharest. At the end of Decembrie I had traveled about 40km along the Argeș river starting from the 1st of Decembrie, downstream to Budești. Now I will start from 1 December but this time I will ride up the river to where the river runs under the A1 highway. At the exit of 1 Decembrie, just before the bridge over Arges, you must turn right onto a dirt road that exits on the embankment on the left bank of the river. The proposed road segment will start from here.

There are about 15 Km to go on this dam. The road is quite wide in the first part and as you get closer to Cornetu it will become a little narrower. There are quite a lot of potholes and sometimes quite large bumps along the entire width of the road, almost like the ones from the moto-cross. Argeș is not always visible because it is often hidden behind a curtain of trees or sometimes the dam is a little further from the water line. From place to place there are roads that descend to the water’s edge, you can descend to admire the scenery but you will have to return to the embankment if you want to continue.

What is very disturbing about this whole portion off the route are the piles of rubbish that you will encounter at every turn.

A few kilometers from Cornetu, you will pass by two areas where there were massively excavated and now it looks like small canyons. Immediately after this area, the road bends and you can either take it to the right and keep the left bank, or take it to the left and you will cross Argeș river on 2 improvised bridges on some prefabricated concrete tubes. I chose the second version because it is more spectacular. After you cross the river the road climbs slightly then you can either follow the main road further, or you can take it on a small shortcut over the field till you get near the base of the Mihăilești dam. Then climb on a concrete road and enter on DN6 just on the dam where we turn right towards Cornetu.

Unfortunately the road on the bank of the accumulation lake on the dam is closed with a barrier so I had to go up to the next roundabout in the village, then left until I came out near the embankment of the lake. From here I tried to keep my way near the embankment until I found a way to get me back on the embankment. Thus I had to go on several agricultural roads until I arrived in the village of Ordoreanu where there is the first option where you can climb the embankment again. Unfortunately the lake is behind us so we will not see it.

The road on the embankment is as I expected, quite good, with some slight bumps but it seems that in this area there are less rubbish. We will not go too far on the embankment, because after passing the village of Țegheș, the road disappears in a forest and at one point you will not be able to go forward because it is interrupted by a ditch. Anyway here you need to find a bypass variant to be able to cross the Bucharest-Videle railway. From Țegheș, you will have to find the road that goes over the railway, then cross it after a detour near a forest you will intersect with the county road 130, from which you will have to go to the right just before crossing Arges river.

The road continues on the edge of a forest and sometimes there may be muddy areas even though the last rain was a few weeks ago. Then the road passes by a ballast station, then after about 2 km, another one, after which we will reach an area with many ponds. From here you will have to reach near the water treatment station Crivina, along which there is a road that takes us to “civilization”.

From here I tried several times to reach the Arges river bank again, but in the end I gave up because it seems that on the left bank of Argeș in this area there are no roads, so I took it through Bolintin Vale and I took the A1 motorway and then back to Bucharest.

So if you want to combine this route with the one made by us from 1 Decembrie to Budeși and thus you will have a offroad route about 80 Km long, on the banks of Argeș that can be fun at the beginning or end of the season when in the mountains is too cold or it’s snow.