Brandywine Falls

Brandywine Falls Provincial Park is located adjacent to the Sea-to-Sky Highway (99), located 47 kilometers north of Squamish, and 13 kilometers south of Whistler. The entrance to the park is well signed and is almost impossible to miss. From the parking area, an easy trail crosses the creek and parallels the stream for about 400m to a viewpoint perched atop the cliffs overlooking the falls.Brandywine Falls is one of the most popular and significant waterfalls to be found along the Sea-to-Sky corridor between Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia. The falls hurtle a sheer 59 meters (194 feet) over a cliff formed by eruptions from the nearby Garibaldi Volcanic field, and chiseled into a deep, sheer-walled canyon by the erosive power of Brandywine Creek and the constant freeze-thaw cycle. Signs at the viewpoint for the falls as well as literature provided by the BC Provincial Park Service cite its height as 70 meters, and other sources have suggested a height of 65 meters. We measured the falls in May of 2018 to instead stand 59 meters tall. Brandywine Creek drains from a large basin covering approximately 50 square kilometers (about 20 square miles), rising to a maximum elevation of just over 2200 meters. There are two small glaciers which feed directly into the creek, one on Brandywine Mountain (the larger of the two) and one on Mount Fee. Both glaciers provide an ample late summer flow into the creek, but the high elevation of the whole basin and the heavy winter snow pack in the area both help to ensure the ground remains well saturated through the year and the volume of the creek is consistently high. A small hydroelectric generating station operates on Brandywine Creek upstream of the falls (it has no effect on the falls, the tailrace returns the water to the creek above the falls), a testament to the tendency for the stream to swell to considerable sizeThe name of the falls is said to have originated from a bet between two Canadian Pacific Railroad workers who placed a wager on the height of the falls – one man bet a bottle of brandy and the other a bottle of wine. Stories of this wager don't specify what the agreed upon height of the falls ended up being, but given our measurements came in under the "officlal" figure, one must wonder if perhaps the wrong individual won the bet.