How My Love For Mushrooms Began..

My fascination with fungi started pretty early, I grew up on a small farm on the Kitsap Peninsula of Washington State, a temperate area with moderate rainfall and large conifer forests. A good home for fungi. Living with my mother and sister on a small chicken and rabbit farm of 5 acres, I had carved out trails through the forest behind the barn. I spent many of my days playing with my dog and walking the trails behind the house. My earliest memory of an interest in fungi was an old stump, a hardwood, probably a big leaf maple, with huge clusters of beautiful yellowish mushrooms growing all over it. They fascinated and captivated me. They touched a part of me that harkened back too the darker enchanted parts of Disney movies, of mysterious and magical woods. The mushrooms cascaded down the stump forming large plumes of thick fruiting bodies clustered together. I really had no means of understanding what they were, this was in the mid-1980s and unless you had a foraging guide or a mushroom identification guide there were little places to find out about which mushrooms were which. Years later I deducted that they must have been sulfur tufts (Hypholoma fasciculare), a poisonous mushroom that is really common on dead hardwood in the area. It must have been around the same time that I started to notice all kinds of different mushrooms, and my interest was observed by my grandmother. 

She had an interest in wild mushrooms, as well as collecting butterfly specimens. She was taught about mushrooms by her stepmother, a gal named Toshi who came from Japan with my great grandpa following world war II. She told my grandma of the old times in the old country, picking mushrooms high in the mountain forests, a very special mushroom called Matsutake. My grandma related stories of her memories of her stepmother hanging these mushrooms that she had foraged on strings in the windows to dry. She very much impressed on me the uniqueness and importance of the pine mushroom. My next memory is about mushrooms was about my grandma, living in a apartment complex for senior citizens, and taking me across the street to the forest behind the local Junior high. In the forest we collected a couple of mushrooms that we found trail side, put them in a basket, and carried them back to her apartment. She produced a couple of old field guides which had pictures of mushrooms, mostly in black and white. We didn't take time to look through the keys, we just kind of looked at the photos and compared them to the mushrooms sitting on the table. We had a vague idea of what they were but we're definitely not sure enough to try eating them. She was however familiar with chanterelle mushrooms. A few years later, she bought a small piece of property in the southeastern Olympic mountains near Lake Cushman. A beautiful area on the edge of a protected national forest. During late summer I would stay with her for a couple of weeks and ride my motorcycle around on the long dirt roads. One day she handed me a basket and told me to go out into the forest and try to find some large orange mushrooms growing under the brush. If I found anything that looked like that bring it back and she would help me to identify them. I left and it wasn't long before I found mushrooms matching her description. Excitedly I plucked them from the ground and filled up the bucket rather quickly. When I got back to her place she was astonished to see the beautiful and large golden chanterels that I had found. I remember the look on her and her friends face, the excitement that they had was infectious. It was from that moment on, when I was 13 years old, that I really caught the mushroom fever. Ever since then I have been frequenting the forests around my town. I started to notice small similarities between the different forests that I would find the same mushrooms in. The trees, the plants, the flora, all of these subtle things combined would lead me to new mushroom foraging areas. I discovered that the local library had some mushroom foraging guides, so I helped myself to them, sneaking some of them into my backpack and stealing them. I would thumb through them with amazement in secrecy. I was shy about the hobby. I was forming my personality based on some ideas of what it looked like to be cool, and mushroom hunting and scientific things definitely didn't fit that mold, so I kept it to myself. But year after year every rainy season I found myself trudging through the brush looking for not only chanterels, but matsuake and various other prized edibles that I had only heard about up to that point, like the lobster mushroom and the chicken of the woods. I was probably 16 when I found my first matataki, one year after my grandma's passing. When she passed away all of her field guides were passed down to me, which still are on my shelf above my most prized mushroom altar. 

 When I was 16 I was introduced to another kind of mushroom, by this time I had been drinking on the weekends and smoking pot and a couple of friends asked me if I would like to try magic Mushrooms. Of course I would. It was late October and I snuck out of my bedroom window of the rambler farmhouse and ran up the road to meet my friend who had a small yellow Toyota truck. We swung by Parkview terrace, a low income neighborhood and picked up a couple of friends and headed to a place called the lakes, a retirement community in Gig harbor Washington that had sprawling green lawns that were well manicured. We snuck around the gates at night with small flashlights in our baseball caps inverted to collect the small slimy brown mushrooms we found growing in the moonlight in the lawns. The two guys who had some experience with mushrooms, Jake and Roy, called these mushrooms blue ringers. Everybody at that time knew what blue ringers were. A small brown hallucinogenic mushroom that grew in fairly big clusters in really nicely manicured green lawns. This was the mid-1990s, and all of the new housing tracts had lawns made of imported sod, the sod was inoculated with the mushroom mycelium. When the rains hit in the fall the mushrooms exploded, inviting teenagers to trample through the newly laid lawns of housing developments across the Puget sound. That night we picked probably 3 lb of blue ringers, stuffing them all into a large 2 gallon juice container and we piled into the truck and headed back to my friend Roy's house whose parents were out of town. We dumped all of the mushrooms into a large cooking pot and just barely covered them with water. We simmered the mushrooms and the water for about 20 minutes and poured cups of tea. 3 lb of mushrooms to 4 lb of tea made some pretty dark sludge. I can still remember the taste and the smell today. We drank the cups quickly, not knowing what to expect. The next few hours was one of the most powerful and life-changing experiences I ever had. People seemed to be speaking in tongues, I got stuck in a time loop, repeating the same motions, saying the same things over and over for what felt like hours. At one point my friend Richie and I went to take the colander of the strained mushroom pulp outside to dump it into the bushes. We hardly made it to the edge of Roy's lawn when we realized that we were probably going to get lost, we were severely confused. As time went on the powerful effects of the mushrooms continued to get heavier and heavier. Richie lost control and started breaking the screen door on Roy's house. Roy and Jake tried to settle him down and reason with him but he seemed to be speaking in tongues, completely out of control of himself or his actions. I remember Jake pulling up a political vote sign from the street side and poking Richie with it until he corralled him into his truck. Once Richie was in the truck he didn't have the wear with all of the figure out how the door handles worked so he sat there speaking gibberish and breaking the mirror in his hand. I remember going out and trying to talk to him, telling him I had to get home before daylight because my mom was going to freak out. There is no hope in getting him to drive me the 5 mi home at 4:00 a.m. So I started walking, I walked for at least an hour till I got home and crawled in my bedroom window. I slid the window shut, eyes bulging and dilated, and slid into my bed just before my mom tapped on the door and told me it was time to wake up for school. And she opened the door a rush of cold air met her and she gasped. she remarked on how cold it was in my room, there seem to be a layer of frost on everything because I left the window open all night. I got up that morning and took a quick shower and got dressed, dreading how I was going to get through the day. I went to school that day, 8th grade in junior high. I remember dozing off during a couple of classes but for the most part I did all right. I got through that day and never got in trouble, my mom never knew about what had happened that night. Richie made a full recovery, we all did, and we all remembered that night fondly, with a new respect for hallucinogenic mushrooms. Most field guides would describe those particular mushrooms, blue ringers or Psilocybe stuntzii, as being mild or weak, but when taken in a large enough quantity there anything but mild. 

All three of the other guys from that night have passed away, I'm the only one left with the memories of that experience. I will forever remember those guys, and that night, a night that concreted my fascination with fungi and led me to a life where an obsession for fungi has only grown like the mycelium have a great mushroom.

Waxy Caps in Late Winter

This is typically my least favorite time of the year. Despite still being ski season, which I do like, the weather here in Washington can be pretty lame this time of year. Rarely warming above 40 degrees, and not usually cold enough to snow, its just a cold drab, and often windy part of the year, oh yea- and there are no mushrooms out. Well, there are some tree conchs, the occasional lawn mushroom, and a smattering of uninteresting small saprobic mushrooms like Tubaria. I will say that the turkey tail(Trametes versicolor) can be quite lovely this time of year, but other than that I have to get creative to post consistent content on the channel. This time of the year is by far the slowest traffic to the YouTube channel, seconded only by the depths of summer, which has fleshy edible mushrooms growing like summer Chanterelle and Lobster Mushrooms.

Then I remembered I haven’t taken my annual winter walk at Manchester State Park. This park was a military installment in WW2 and still has many of the old cement bunkers and military garages that are now open to the public. The park is perched on a point of the southern Kitsap Peninsula on the edge of Rich Passage, a small strip of saltwater connecting the Sinclair inlet to the larger part of the Puget Sound. This park isn’t my typical mushroom hunting grounds, because I tend to prefer spending my time strolling in lush conifer forests and Manchester doesn’t have much of that. This park is comprised more of a mix of large Maple trees and a lot of Red-cedar, neither of which are partners of ectomycorrhizal mushrooms. This is a place where I often find loads of Oyster mushrooms in the spring, growing from dead Alder trees between the parking lots. One year I even found a huge patch of Morels, a saprobic type of meaty morel by the hundreds, growing among the maple leaf duff. That was quite untypical. I have returned every year since but I have never found another Morel there.

One thing I do seem to find this time of year growing among the maple leaf litter and the cedar scales is waxy caps, beautiful and brightly colored gilled mushrooms in the genus Hygrocybe. These mushrooms are not typically known to be edible, as they are often in too small of amounts and have a strange texture. They are very photogenic and just really cool to look at and find though. Usually red to orange and bright yellow, these mushrooms stand out against the drab landscape of the lamest part of the year, signaling the start of a warm up leading into spring.

Yesterday I took Gunnar on a small stroll through the winding trails up the hill from the parking lot, looking carefully and slowly, as I am hopeful to find any mushrooms to photograph and film this time of year. Sometimes I will find deadly Galerina growing in this area, which I find fascinating and I like to photograph. But on my walk I was finding nothing! A small crust fungi growing on a twig here or there, but aside from that, nothing, nada. How depressing. I zigzagged through the woods for about 30 minutes with my trusty hound, going to all the usual spots where I expect to find something, only to be disappointed again and again. I guess I had came too early, even for the very mild winter we are having. I decided to head back to the truck and refocus my mycophile mind on the next “top 10” video I could make, when low and behold I saw a flash of orange peeking from beneath the leaf duff on the side of the trail. Tah Dah! they’re out! I came across two beautiful orange/yellow colored waxy caps in a small niche, a microhabitat, on the back fence line of the park. They dont smell like much, and a small nibble and spit of the edge of the cap has not much flavor, but a sweet and almost metallic thing going on. I like to hold them and look at them, then photograph them. They can be tricky to photograph because theyre so bright, often you have to lower the exposure to see the details. I encountered two more, brightly colored yellow ones just 20 feet up the trail, which were blown out, caps laying in the leaves, from old age. I suspect they’re the same species, just of different maturity levels. I’m not exactly sure of the species, as many of these mushrooms are yet to truly be described here for the west coast, but I would compare them to Hygrocybe flavescens, the European variety. After filming and photographing them I collected one to bring home for the microscope, and it sits next to me as I type this. I’m glad the mushroom Gods smiled on me once again, and I am happy to report the Wax caps are up in this area and worth the search if you like to look at pretty mushrooms!

Truffle Season, my first..

Even though I love mushrooms and find fungi fascinating, I never knew much about truffles. Its sort of a guarded art, the business of truffle hunting, and eating, for that matter. It seems like some weird French delicacy like snails or goose liver that I would probably never get a chance to actually try. And, because they grow underground, they seemed very unlikely to stumble upon. I have found truffles laying on the forest floor, or on a log or branch, clearly unearthed by someone or something, likely an animal like a squirrel, but with some investigation I was never convinced they were of any culinary value. The ones I have found were known as “deer truffles,” and despite having a very ornate and bumpy outer rind, the insides are usually comprised of a black powdery substance. These are in the genus Elaphomyces, and are known as deer truffles, of no culinary value to humans. Also, while at the Washington coast on a foray with the famous Alan Rockefeller, I got to see and study Rhizopogon, a different truffle like fungi thats actually related to Suillus mushrooms, a bolete of sorts. There are a couple other types of these “false truffles,” and as was pointed out to me by truffle guru and mycologist Dr. Charles LeFevre, they are all basidiomycetes, more closely related to gilled and bolete type mushrooms. “Basido’s” as they’re often called produce spores on a fertile cell known as a basidia, usually growing 4 spores per cell, but the good truffles, the culinary truffles, whether it be in Italy or Oregon, are ascomycetes, more closely related to morels and Helvella, and other mushrooms with the leathery and bizarre shaped fruiting bodies.

This year, 2024, I got to experience local, culinary ascomycete truffles for the first time. We are training a dog, a 1 year old GSP named Loki, and we were invited by Truffle Dog Company to the Joriad Truffle Dog Contest in Eugene Oregon in February, giving the mycophile in me somehting to appease my obsession in the middle of winter. We loaded the truck and went to Oregon on a Saturday morning to the festival. Thats where I met Dr. LeFevre, a PhD in Biology and a truffle farmer, probably the most sucessful truffle farmer in North America, and I got to join him while the tupperwares of truffles came in from the field, at the awards part of the ceremony, at the very beautiful Willamette Valley Winery later that night. The smell of the tubs of truffles almost knocked me off of my feet. To me, smelling them, freshly dug and in large quantity, they wreaked of solevent or diesel, maybe mixed with a funky kinda garlicky smell. I was aghast as to what all the hype was about. They had a bunch of foods, smothered in Oregon White Truffle, Tuber oregonense, like flatbread, French onion soup, crostinis, and pastries, all with elegant flakes of freshly shaved truffles. Eating the food felt strange to me, like some weird experiment, a challenge of sorts, to tolerate the flavor and maybe even actually like it. It truly is a unique smell, not that everyone will like. In fact, I would bet, that most people would say they dont care for them once they tried them. But by the end of the night, after all the chatter, the twinkling surroundings of the Vineyard Chateau, something else was at play that was making the fungi more appealing. The thrill of each bite, to get to consider and explain what I was tasting. They grew on me, the strange scent that seemed to permeate from my throat, even 10 minutes after eating them, was exciting. Charles remarked that they add ‘electricity’ to food, which I thought was a good description. That night I left with a Styrofoam to-go box with probably the most expensive doggie bag I had ever tossed in the back seat of my Tahoe. Later that night in the hotel I found myself eating just the truffles off of the flatbread and crostini’s, just to see again what it was like. You can’t help but to smile after taking a bite of truffle, and look around for the reaction of others that might be feeling the same as you are.

After that I was hooked and the following weekend had the pleasure of going out with a generous and nice fellow named Will, from Vashon Island. He showed us his spot, and Loki founf his first few wild truffles. Will’s dog, Penny, found 28 White truffles in about 2 hours, which he sent home with us. I have made truffle eggs, risotto, a ton of butter infused with the scent, as well as grapeseed oil. I truffled potato chips and avocado, it infuses well with anything containing fat, so cheese or cream works well. Everyone else in the family doesnt like them, the kids actually run from the smell, but they also like to put ketchup on scrambled eggs, so there is that..

I am still very interested in habitat and trying to find some growing here on the Kitsap Peninsula, although no luck yet. Ill keep this posted, or not, IDK. Ive never written a blog, but I do like to write, so who knows, maybe this will become my new thing. Mush Love.