THE OUTDOORS ISSUE
LIKE A CLUMP OF
FAIRY UMBRELLAS,
MARASMIUS
MUSHROOMS
BURST FROM A
BED OF MOSS
ALONG THE SOUTH
SANTIAM RIVER
IN THE CASCADES
EAST OF CORVALLIS
Wet, Dirty,
Sometimes
Fruitless
Mushroom
Hunting
The joy in the pursuit of fungi
BY J E S LY N L E M K E
PHOTO COURTESY BUDDY MAYS PHOTOGRAPHY
I
f you’ve never battled your way through wet Oregon
undergrowth for hours and hours, hoping to collect
two to four ounces of mushrooms to take home, then
this is the story for you.
As someone who has successfully found chante-
relles and porcini mushrooms on about four trips out of
30 in the past four years, you should take all of my advice.
The dank forests to the west of Eugene (around Walton
and Mapleton) and the drier Willamette National Forest to
the east of Eugene hold mushrooms. Elusive? Yes. Deli-
cious? Definitely. Expensive at the store and sinfully free
when collected via sweat and hiking? Priceless.
On May 3, I headed east on Highway 126 West, hoping
to catch the tail end of yellow-foot chanterelle season or the
early beginnings of the spring porcini season. I drove about
50 miles, far into the Willamette National Forest, past the
Belknap Springs and Blue River’s Carmen Reservoir.
I’d already been warned by Mycological Natural Prod-
ucts owner Owen Rice that our exceptionally long and wet
winter this year would delay the spring mushroom hunting.
This bulk buyer of raw mushrooms (located off W. 11th in
Eugene) keeps a daily pulse on how the season is develop-
ing via the mushroom sellers who arrive each evening to
sell the day’s “catch.”
“It stayed cold and wet and dark for so long this year,”
he says, leading him to believe there aren’t many morels
fruiting locally this year. “It’s still too cold,” Rice says.
Rice was right. I didn’t find porcinis or morels that day.
After parking off Hwy 126 at an elevation still well below
the snow pack, I wandered around for a while on sever-
al sunny logging roads. I came across handfuls of wilted
yellow-foot chanterelles, their wet heads drooping into the
moss, tired of life already. I picked them anyway, along
with several perky hedgehog mushrooms.
I love a good hedgehog mushroom. While chanterelles
become little drama queens in their death, melting or wilt-
BASIC ADVICE ON
MUSHROOM HUNTING
Words of wisdom from Owen Rice of Myco-
logical Natural Products
1.
Check if the land you are picking on is
public or private.
2.
Look into getting a personal use per-
mit from the park’s ranger station (for
example, the Willamette National For-
est station on Hwy 126 issues permits).
3.
Pack water, snacks and sunscreen.
4.
Do not lock your keys in your car af-
ter parking in a remote area (I have
definitely never done this on a blister-
ing August day two years ago outside
Mapleton).
5.
Properly identify the mushrooms you
are picking.
6.
Tell someone exactly where you are
picking and bring a GPS with you.
Many phones do not get reception up
in the Cascades.
ing over in dramatic death throes, hedgehogs have a good
hardness to their structure.
I’m climbing uphill past a pine tree when a a bird, per-
haps a grouse, explodes to my left. She’s definitely some
kind of game bird; her fat frame clears a low path over the
forest floor before landing, clumsily, on a pine tree. I peer
over into her nest. She’s dug out a little pit for herself at the
base of the pine tree, but doesn’t have eggs yet.
Birds abound, but porcini and morel season, as Rice
predicts, will likely pick up in our area around May 20 and
run through June to July-ish.
I return to the car and try another logging road, this time
over by Hwy 20, where it intersects with Deer Creek road.
Rice says that a good porcini hunter will return to the same
patch year after year.
“They’ll look for bumps in the ground and pull it out
when it’s in button stage, before insects have found it,” he
says. “You are going to camp in that area, return every two
or three days, looking for those bumps in the ground. Now
it’s your secret patch.”
Mushrooming in the Northwest can be big business;
Rice’s business employs 17 mushroom enthusiasts. He of-
ten flies fresh bulk orders of mushrooms, picked the day
before, to high-end restaurants around the U.S.
Back on the mountain off Hwy 20, I’ve got at least 6
ounces of wilted yellow-foot chanterelles to show for my
five hours of staggering through the hillsides. Last fall, I
managed to pick nine pounds of yellow chanterelles near
Walton in a single day, which is my record. Come mid-
May, I’ll be out near Sisters for the start of porcini season.
I can’t wait. ■
eugeneweekly.com • May 18, 2017
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