Distance done: 16.0km
Elevation done: 1000m
Brandywine has quickly become one of my favourite summits. It's a great mix of easy hiking and more challenging boulder-hopping with some steep terrain and a bit of route-finding thrown in for good measure. And then there are the stunning views. Mountains, glaciers, meadows, lakes... Definitely a hike to save for a sunny day, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it is ridiculously scenic.
The new trail into the meadows still had a muddy spot or two but it's a massive improvement on the old trail. We were in the upper meadows within an hour or so. Beyond that there is an intermittent trail and cairns for guidance up to the ridge. More cairns pointed the way up to the higher part of the ridge, although they ran out a couple of hundred metres short of the summit, which is where the route-finding comes it as the summit can't be seen at this point. The summit itself is a small bump on top of a bigger bump, big enough for our group to find (un)comfy rocks to sit on to enjoy lunch. There's a summit register in which to add your name and it was fun to find our old entry from 2014 :-) Just watch those sheer drop-offs on the north-west side - they are unforgiving, to put it mildly!
The road to the upper parking lot was very rough and steep in places: our CR-V struggled in a couple of spots with a full load of 5 hikers. A vehicle with some clearance definitely seems like a good idea as the bumpy road causes the vehicle to bounce quite a bit. A Subaru Outback made it up OK though. Budget about half an hour for the logging road.
Car-to-car was almost exactly 9 hours (we were leaving the meadows just as the sun set) including a full hour on the summit.
Fall colours in the meadows were at their peak, and much more vivid and widespread than I was expecting. A few berries remaining on the bushes, but not many. Flowers were few and far between, just a few yellow and pink monkeyflower holding on near the creeks in the upper meadows.