Hunting for Mushrooms

Late season may mean fungi through December in Estacada

By Vanessa Van Voorhis

The Estacada News, Dec 3, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Stropharia

Vanessa Van Voorhis / Estacada News

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Each fall, a fabulous array of mushrooms blankets the woods of Estacada. The change of seasons, coupled with the area’s shady pine forests and winding Clackamas River, creates inviting conditions for some highly revered edible mushrooms.

“Estacada is mostly vertical or close to it, and it’s wonderfully diverse,” said Maggie Rogers, head of Oregon Mycological Society (OMS) and contributing editor of The Journal of Wild Mushrooming. “I was up there two weeks ago leading a group. Most of the roads were gated. The mushrooms we found were edible. We brought back chanterelles, matsutakis, porcinis…The season seems to be a little bit late but very good.”

OMS, based in Portland, hosts a series of seasonal mushroom hunting field trips throughout Oregon for its members. “There’s nothing better than going with someone who knows what they’re doing,” she said. Membership is open to the public. “Come to a meeting, see if it makes sense, and pay your dues.”

If you are curious about the mushrooms in your neighborhood but are not quite sure if you are ready to start paying dues, there are other ways you can start exploring the thousands of fungi right outside your door.

“Start with a book about mushrooms,” Lane Community College mycology instructor Marcia Peeters says. “But you don’t want one with a picture key. You want to use a dichotomous key, a fungus key for identification, where you’re asked questions to answer.”

Peeters recommends Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora. Its 959 fact-filled pages make it like an amateur mushroom hunter’s bible for fungi identification. It is heavy, a little costly and may look intimidating at first glance, but it is well worth it.

Before you go, use your field guide to learn the general types of fleshy fungi, says Peeters. What differentiates a bolete from a polypore or an agaric from a chanterelle? Being able to answer these questions in advance can save you a lot of time and effort. “It helps, too, if people learn the general characteristics of cantharellaceae, russulaceae and lactarius.”

Next, gather your hunting supplies. Peeters, an avid mushroom hunter for more than 20 years, recommends the following to her students: a whistle and a compass in case you get lost, a basket for carrying mushrooms, a hunting knife for digging them out of the ground, wax paper to wrap them, a writing tablet and pencil to record their characteristics, and spore print paper to help identify them.

Like pollen from flower, spores will fall naturally from the spore-producing surface of the mushroom, such as the gills. Spores may be pink, red, black, brown, white or shades of gray, and often do not resemble the color of the mushroom.

Spore print paper is useful for determining spore color, which is an important step in the mushroom identification process. The small, half-black, half-white, squares of coated paper allow one to differentiate the many subtle shades of mushroom spores. The paper may be purchased online for a few dollars.

Although exploring the forest with a basket may be physically awkward, and might even conjure up images of Little Red Riding Hood, there is no better way to carry a collection of fungi without damaging them. Choose one large enough to hold an armful's worth of mushrooms.

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