By: Jack Souther Date: August 16, 2002 In the summer of 1910,
Jack Nelson, a surveyor for the Howe Sound and Northern Railway,
and his axeman, Bob Mollison came upon a spectacular waterfall
plunging into a rocky gorge near their campsite at Daisy Lake.
Being surveyors they speculated on the height of the falls, and
being betting men Nelson wagered his bottle of brandy against
Mollison’s bottle of wine – closest estimate to the measured
height takes all. The pre-metric height of the falls turned out
to be 195 feet. The axeman got the booze and the name
“Brandywine” stuck long after the bottles were drained. Although
Brandywine Falls was first measured and named in 1910 the
sequence of events that lead to their formation goes back
several thousand years. No one was around back then to witness
the series of volcanic eruptions that flooded the ancestral
Cheakamus valley with basalt lava flows. The vent and cinder
cone from which they came has long ago disappeared – eroded away
by ice that later flowed through the