Washington State Magazine

Jack Rogers started his career as a teacher and forest pathologist in the Pacific Northwest. Today he travels the world hunting for fungi that affect hardwoods, though he still visits the local woods each spring to hunt for morels. Photo by Bruce Andre.

The foragers

Ten percent of the world’s wild edible fungi are produced in the Pacific Northwest, and thousands of people from northern California up through British Columbia are out hunting for them.

While Rogers was making his first explorations into Washington’s forests in the 1960s, the state was starting to realize the value of its forest products. In 1967, the legislature enacted a law regulating the harvesting, transplant, and sale of forest goods like mushrooms.

In the 1980s and 1990s, commercial fungus hunting expanded on public lands throughout the Northwest. At the time, landowners and the general public had no real sense of the value of mushrooms and medicinal plants, crucial parts of the forest’s understory ecosystem, says Jim Freed, special forest products specialist for WSU Extension. Freed works with commercial foragers as well as landowners whose properties are popular sites for gathering mushrooms and other forest products like moss, sword ferns, salal—a plant used in floral arrangements—and conks--shelflike fungi that grow on the trunks of trees. He urges foragers to harvest gently and leave behind some of the mushroom and plant life, so that more might grow back. “People need to know when to pick, how to pick, and how not to pick too much,” he says.

Morels, for example, should be cut at the stem rather than plucked from the ground. That leaves the base behind, protects the habitat, and provides potential future mushrooms.

When Freed started work for WSU in 1977, he realized he had to convince the public and government that there was a lot more to a forest than the trees. It took a large fire in 1979 to open everybody’s eyes, he said. The blaze near Bend, Oregon, left behind ideal growing conditions for morels and the highly desirable matsutake mushrooms. More than 2,000 people came to camp and hunt mushrooms, says Freed. Land managers, shocked at the turnout, were overwhelmed. They kept asking Freed, “Where did these mushrooms come from?” He had to explain that they were there all along, just hidden beneath the soil.

The Pacific Northwest is one of the most diverse and productive regions of the country when it comes to fungi, particularly medicinal and edible fungi like truffles and mushrooms. In an average year, wild edible fungi in the Pacific Northwest support a $50 million industry.

Most hunters are out looking for three types of mushrooms: the matsutake, the chanterelle, and the morel. The matsutake, a chewy mushroom that grows in pine stands, commands the highest price, being less abundant and highly desirable, especially in the Japanese market. Morels are more abundant than the matsutake, but are still highly valuable. Chanterelles are a favorite in European cuisines.

Commercial foragers in the Pacific Northwest are mostly immigrants and first-generation citizens, often from Asia and Mexico, says Freed. They do serious hunting in the woods, and are incredibly efficient at finding and removing what’s valuable. They sell their finds at buying stations, often pick-up trucks parked at intersections near the hunt sites. On a bad day, they could make $70. On a good one, hundreds. On a very, very good one, $1,000.

That’s why many commercial hunters are very secretive and protective of their sites. Even hobby hunters can be territorial.

“Some people say there is a gold rush mentality,” says Freed about the people who flock to the woods to hunt. But he sees that changing, as our attitudes about mushrooms change. Freed envisions a day when families will go out foraging with an experienced guide. Children could learn about the woods, and the whole family would have a great outdoor experience. “They do this in Japan,” he says. “Besides, wouldn’t it be better to go in and pick your own?”

Sharing secrets

Lori Carris’s chanterelle spot is about 40 miles from Pullman. She happened upon it one fall day while exploring an area known for its wealth of spring mushrooms. She was cruising along a gravel road in the woods, when she saw a flash of yellow. “I stopped in a hurry, and then put my car into reverse.” There, just off the road, lay the most beautiful, buttery patch of mushrooms.

A local chanterelle. Photo by Lori Carris.

Of course, I ask her to take me there. “I can take you, but you’ll have to ride in the trunk of my car,” she cracks.

As we head out of town, she explains that she only shares this site with a small group of friends and a few select students. “This is where I’ve found these beautiful golden mushrooms,” she says, her voice softening. “Once I discovered one as big as a dinner plate. Oh, it was a beauty.”

When Carris was in college, she never imagined a career in plant pathology. After finishing school in the Midwest, she happened into a master’s program at Washington State University. She worked with raspberries and their uptake of a fungicide. So her first work with a fungus was less about how to find it and study it, and more about how to get rid of it.

After college, she got a letter from a scientist who wanted her to work with him as a doctoral student at the University of Illinois. Then she was lured back to Pullman with the prospect of a job in the plant pathology department. Today she teaches basic fungus and plant pathology courses, and is often called upon to identify molds that show up in homes and public buildings, as well as fungi that affect crops. Her specialty is smut fungi, which affect wild and cultivated grasses, including the thousands of acres of wheat and barley that cover eastern Washington.

Carris may not have planned to go into mycology, but once she’s in the woods, it’s clear she’s cut out for it. Within seconds, she’s off into the brush, her puff of blond curls catching the glints of sunlight filtering through the trees. Aha, she says as she runs her fingers up a Corallorhiza, a coral root orchid. It doesn’t have chlorophyll, she explains. It uses a fungus to absorb nutrients collected by the trees around it. It wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil, she says.

When she’s mushroom hunting, she carries a red plastic grocery basket and wears a magnifying loupe and plastic whistle around her neck. She always brings along a copy of Mushrooms Demystified, because even scientists can use help identifying their finds. But mushrooms aren’t her only prey.

A half-hour into our hike, she drops to her knees in front of a pile of elk dung. She picks up a pellet and holds it to her loupe. She could bring this back to her lab, where, under the right conditions, it will sprout a variety of fungi, particularly mushrooms. It’s a great thing to show students, she says.

As for the chanterelles, the sampling she collects for teaching is woefully small. “It’s hard for me to preserve my specimens for class,” she confesses. “It’s because they’re so good. I have to eat them.”

One of her great peeves is seeing “wild mushrooms” on a menu. More often than not they’re commercially grown shiitake or oyster mushrooms, she says. “There’s nothing wild about them. Consumers need to know that.”

The chanterelle, on the other hand, just can’t be grown commercially. “There’s something that they’re getting from the tree that we can’t figure out how to replicate,” says Carris. But in the wild, they can be plentiful. They appear near a wide range of tree hosts, especially conifers, as in the woods we’re visiting. We agree to return in a month or two to hunt for them.

As we leave the forest behind, we pass a large, manicured farm with thoroughbreds and green pastures sectioned with white fences. The owners have picked a beautiful spot to settle, says Carris. “But I wonder if they even know what’s back there in the woods.”

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The foragers

Sharing secrets

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Continued.