Stop, drop and look: Foraging in the high Sierras

I haven't hunted in ages. I haven't even gone fishing. But Hank and I went foraging at an undisclosed location in the high Sierras yesterday, and while our haul wasn't epic, it was a perfectly beautiful way to spend a Saturday.

Here's what we saw, through my macro lens (click "Read more" below the slideshow for captions):


1. Morel in its habitat.

2. Morels back home in the studio - we collected ten, but came home with nine because my bag tore and I lost one.

3. False morel. Really, who would think that's a morel?

4. Bracken fern.

5. Another fern (some kind of fiddlehead, not sure exactly which kind).

6. Watercress in its habitat (a cool mountain stream).

7. Currant flowers. That bush is going to be loaded later this summer!

8. Bumble bee on unidentified flower.

9. Red ant - moving way too fast for me to catch him in that lighting.

10. Black ant - mercifully not as frantic as the red ant.

11. Baby mountain jay, out of the nest too early. The second I dropped to my knees to peer at him, his parents set up in a nearby tree and squawked at me relentlessly. Hope he makes it, but I doubt he survived the night.

12. These are from a heap of feathers I found while looking for morels. I have NO IDEA what bird they're from. Ideas anyone? (Update: A hurrah goes out to Rebecca O'Connor and Rene Simon for pulling this bird out of a hat: red-shafted flicker!)

© Holly A. Heyser 2011

Mushroom hunting: Love at first sight

If you believe the old saw that men are hunters and women are gatherers, then all is not right in my household, and not just for the obvious reason that I love hunting.

See, Boyfriend loves foraging, and he has noticed that I ... uh ... don't. If he didn't need me to take photos on his foraging trips, I might never accompany him on them at all. It's not that I hate foraging; I just don't love it.

When we went mushroom hunting last weekend, I went along to take photos as usual, but something funny happened: I fell in love with it. It turns out that the quest for a mere fungus - a stationary object! - actually tickles some of the same synapses that hunting does. Who knew? Read more...
Our guide on this trip was Fat of the Landauthor/blogger Langdon Cook, who took us to some of his spots on the east side of the Cascades in Washington state.

Before this trip, I would've called what we were about to do "foraging," but Lang kept referring to it as "mushroom hunting." I didn't know why, but I was about to find out.

Lang hauled us out to some National Forest land in his well-worn Volkswagen Westfalia and went barreling down a dirt road until he found a spot that 1) felt mushroomy and 2) didn't have other mushroom hunters there.

He could somehow tell the difference between mushroom hunters' cars and ordinary hikers' or campers' cars. I didn't quite get it, but I could relate: When you're pulling into a National Wildlife Refuge to go duck hunting, you can definitely tell the difference between hunters' cars and birders'. Birders tend to drive Subarus and Volvos, and tend to wear clothing from REI; hunters favor Ford F150s and wear clothing from Cabela's.

The etiquette was similar: If mushroom hunters were already there, it wasn't cool to barge in on their space. It was also important, once we got out to forage, to do our best NOT to look like mushroom hunters, so as to avoid tipping off competitors that we might be in a good spot. My camera was actually an excellent decoy - "Uh, yeah, nature photography, that's what we're doing here." Heh heh heh.

Starting to get why I liked it?

We had two targets on this trip: spring porcini and morels. At our first stop, Lang excused himself to take a quick survey of our area, then came back and said this was a good spot. He walked us over toward a tree and said, "Holly, do you see anything here?"

I scanned the pine needle-covered ground and spotted two porcini right away. Too easy! Lang showed us how to gently dig around their edges and where on the base to cut them, ensuring that any remaining nubs might have a chance to grow. Then he showed us how to cut away the dirtiest parts of the base, which is part of the "field dressing" process.

Then we spread out in the forest looking for mushrooms. They weren't all as easy as the first two, for sure - you have to develop an eye for the habitat they prefer, as well as for the telltale shape and color easily overlooked by the novice. For example, if you saw this photo anywhere but in this blog post, would you have any clue that you were looking at three porcini?


It seems obvious to me now, but if you're not wearing your mushroom vision, you'd never see those. Oh, in case you missed them, here they are:


Yep, they're the same color as the leaves on the ground.

So I really began to appreciate the whole watchfulness thing, the way you have to relax your vision and look for patterns that feel mushroomy. It's exactly how I feel when I'm out pig hunting, scanning vast open hillsides and looking for that odd little shape that just might be a bedded-down pig. This was way more fun than picking berries, for sure.

When that area was hunted out, Lang took us up the road to another spot where most of our foraging would be done from a path. Why? Morels like disturbed ground, so trails are actually great places to look. And this trail in particular was loaded with a kind of tree that porcini tend to associate with - and no, I can't tell you what kind of tree.

We headed up the trail and I always found myself lagging. Lang's mushroom eye is so good that he can speed along and either spot them or determine a spot isn't so good, but I preferred to linger in one spot a bit longer. I remembered an article from Boston.com about a study of foragers from a rural village in Mexico. "Using GPS and activity monitors, the researchers found that men were less efficient--they traveled farther, went higher, and exerted more effort than women for the same amount of mushrooms."

"Lang, have you noticed a difference in how women hunt for mushrooms versus men?"

He had. My dawdling method was not uncommon among women, and he recalled one mushroom hunting trip in which a woman who hung back from the more widely-ranging men and hit a real mother lode of mushrooms.

When we decided to turn around and head back to the van, I warned the guys to go in front of me, because I liked going slowly.

I ambled back, and found some porcini here and there, and then I noticed a deer trail going straight up the mountainside. I hadn't seen it coming from the other direction, but from this direction, it was more obvious than a two-bit hooker on the nice side of town.

I looked up that hill and decided I needed to go up there. It seemed inexplicably right. So I did. So much for just men ranging far and wide!

My boots dug into the duff and low tree branches slapped me as I burrowed through deer-sized passages. Finally I came up to a deer bed, and in it I found one solitary fawn leg - must've been a tiny baby that got himself et - and a single morel.


Reward! My gut had told me to go up this path, and I got what I was looking for. I kept moving up and found a few more before I decided I should get back, lest the guys think I'd fallen off a cliff someplace.

When I did, I found the cutest scene: They'd decorated a full basket of mushrooms with some edible wild violets that would become part of our salad that night, and they were sitting there drinking beer:


Awwww, isn't that cute?

I told them I'd gone up a deer trail, and Lang said it was a good move, because morels love deer trails. Could this mean I maybe had a knack for this? Fuel that fire, baby!

Back at camp, we had the most amazing camp dinner ever, featuring tons of the mushrooms we'd collected that day:




Yum!

The next morning, we hit a couple more spots near our camp before heading out to a new location, where the first thing we saw was a family panning for gold, the head of the family sporting a .22 semiautomatic in a holster, fingering the clip in his hand.

He was totally friendly, gun notwithstanding. Lang told him we were mushrooming, and he told us that if we headed up the dirt road behind him for about three quarters of a mile, we should find a bunch of morels.

We followed that road, climbing over trees that had blown down across it, and began spotting morels here and there on the side. At one point Lang went ahead, and Boyfriend decided to chill in one spot for a while, taking it easy on that Achilles tendon he'd ruptured in December. And me, I spotted an elk trail and decided going up would be the smartest thing I could do.

It was downright eerie, how certain I was about the spots I needed to hit. I'd look up the hill and think to myself, "Hmmmm. There," and every single time I'd find morels in that spot. Often, but not always, they were elk beds, covered in a fringy moss, bathed in just a little more sunshine than the rest of the forest floor.


Euphoria flooded my brain. Is there anything so sweet in this world as following your gut and getting it right?

If I were a little more mystical, I'd say the mushrooms were talking to me. But because I live with my feet planted firmly on the ground, I'd have to say that mushroom hunting just happens to play to one of my strong suits: my ability to detect and make sense of patterns.

And while having a good eye in hunting is really helpful, in mushroom hunting, it is everything. Once you find mushrooms, there's no shooting or tracking - those babies are yours. And they're really valuable - if you wanted to buy them, you'd have to pay $30 a pound.

After a while, I heard Boyfriend calling me, and began making my way back down the mountain. This would be the end of our trip.

But it would not be our last mushroom-hunting trip. On the long drive back to Sacramento, Boyfriend and I plotted our next moves. Normally our calendar is planned around wild game hunting seasons, but now we had a new season to consider.

Back home, we still might be able to find morels at the highest elevations, before the summer heat really sets in. And fall porcini season is just around the corner.

NOTE: Not all mushrooms in this slideshow are considered edible, and one is quite deadly. There's a reason we stuck to morels and porcini - can you spot the fatal amanita here? If you're interested in seeing what became of the mushrooms we collected, keep an eye on Boyfriend's blog - he'll be posting about the dishes he's made soon.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010