Cody Redmon - Photoblog

Saturday was quite a day. Reports came in a few days ago that morels had started showing up in the burn areas from last year’s forest fires in our region. This marks the transition from river-hunting to mountain-hunting, as well as to new species of these wonderful, crazy looking mushrooms. With my friend Andrew and his parents, we set out at 9am to begin a full day of picking…bear spray at our hips. No more than 50 or 60 feet off the road at our first stop, I found our first delicate prize. Another 50 feet and our first bear tracks. Now, before I have you thinking the first sentence in today’s post is about bears…it isn’t, it just seemed necessary to throw that in there. So, 15 or 20 mushrooms later (each), we had exhausted this first small area and moved on up the road. We found a nice place to stop and headed out again with little luck right out of the gates. We then swung around into a lower meadow and I still cannot believe what we were seeing. Everywhere we looked there were morels. Whites, golds, blacks, grays…you name it, more variety than I’ve ever seen. Small ones, most no bigger than your thumbnail, but just carpeting the ground. I found a single tree that had 52 tucked in its buttress roots, and another downed timber with what had to be nearly 150 along its length. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera at the time, but sure wish I would have. I picked quite a few, as the smaller ones are fantastic for soups, but we left thousands to grow for a few more days…and then it’s just going to be mushroom chaos. I will definitely be taking my camera on the return trip, but until then I decided upon this image from after our return home for the cleaning process. Unlike those we picked in burn areas last year, these seem relatively free of dirt, soot and other debris.