Mushroom Hunting at the End of the World

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A few weeks ago, I joined a group of fungi fanatics at the Yachats Mushroom Festival in Yachats, Oregon. Read on to hear about my adventures.

Contact the Cascade Mycological Society if you want to learn more about mushroom identification, don't take my word for it, I'm a mushroom hunting rookie and some of the facts in here might be skewed by my rookie ways. DON'T EAT THE MUSHROOMS unless you know the mushrooms.

Here I am in the wilds of Oregon's damp and mysterious forest. I'm holding a mushroom that looks like it might be edible, but it isn't!

Last weekend in Yachats, Oregon, folks gathered for the eighth annual Yachats Village Mushroom Festival. The town “mushroomed” with the fungi-curious, expert mushroom hunters, mycologists, and mushroom mongers. I met up with some friends from Utah who were in town for the weekend and we headed to downtown Yachats to check out the mushroom fest. The downtown Village Market sold boxes of several varieties of mushrooms in front of the store. We started downtown, where the mushroom festival organizers had transformed a section of a building into mushroom exhibits.

My friends stand beside a line-up of ‘shrooms being taught by a mushroom hunting veteran Joe Spivack.

I opted to do the mushroom walk beginning at the Cape Perpetua Visitor's Center with Joe Spivak as our guide. Joe was a very likeable and knowledgable guy who encouraged us to touch and handle the mushrooms. It's a myth, he says, that you can get sick just from touching a mushroom. (Side note, I picked up one tiny fungi with a tall stem that turned red where I touched it. It left a slight tingling feeling in my fingers.) Joe chewed a portion of “certain” mushrooms and waited for the taste to come. “This one is peppery,” he said and offered it around. You never want to ingest until you know what you're eating.

We walked up the trail, stopping every twenty yards or so to identify new mushrooms we found covering tree trunks, branches and the forest floor–among a million other places. I even found a cute mushroom growing out of a pine cone. Joe made us all feel special for finding such lovely mushrooms along the route. He especially charmed the young mushroom hunters in the group, making them feel as if they had happened upon mycological wonders undiscovered until that moment.

DISCLAIMER: Please don't go edible mushroom hunting by yourself or with a novice ... this is not a sport for the faint-hearted. Mushrooms are tricky to identify. I met one guy along the route who told me he'd made it his goal to identify one mushroom a year.

The most recognizable edible mushrooms, in my humble opinion, are:

Chanterelles: orange with a signature stem and pattern on the back … the underside of the cap funnels into the stem and has gill-like ridges that run almost all the way down its stipe.

Oysters: pull off the tree in clusters. Gills are white to cream.

Lobster mushrooms: colored like lobsters.

Chicken of the forest: big, ugly burgeoning orange thing that looks something like a character from the Muppet Show.

Most valuable mushroom?

Apart from the truffle, of course, the prize goes to the matsutake, which are hard to find. You have to really hunt for them.

At the end of the guided walk, a handful of us thought we'd try our skill at identifying mushrooms — a new-found skill for me (excluding the years spent plucking morel mushrooms from the forest by my home in the Rocky Mountains). Morels don't really count, as they are so easy to identify.

I wound up walking around with Jason, a colorful guy who had been subsisting in Yachats by working on an organic farm. He'd been traveling for six months–sort of Into the Wild-style–from Michigan to Missoula to El Waco, Washington, and now to Yachats, experiencing life by trying to live off of nothing because he believes the state of affairs in our world will soon require people to do so.

At first I thought he had a point, but then again, he told me he Dumpster dives sometimes, which doesn't seem like the best route to self-reliance (though it is using up food that would otherwise go wasted). I admired his desire to learn about how he could feed himself by farming and foraging, which most people don't seem to have “time” to do. Shouldn't walking in the woods, looking for food be one of the first places we START when considering how to be more self reliant? Gardening and foraging … I love that concept.

Jason the mushroom hunter.

But there was something a little too doomsday-ish about his ideas that, I admit, made me wary. He was convinced our society was on its way out and that the financial collapse was due to some convoluted conspiracy that would prove our eventual demise. Before we parted ways, he mentioned something about Yachats being a great place to settle because it has bridges on both sides and if the community of Yachats wanted to keep people from coming in and begging for food, they could just dynamite the bridges. What?!? Sound like a sci-fi novel. Yeah, there was something not quite right about that.

But in case any of you agree with his assessment, Yachats IS a beautiful coastal town, full of ample mushrooms and with easy access to sea life to gobble up in case the world is INDEED coming to an end.

But I shouldn't give him such a bad rap. Jason did help me identify the beautiful white oyster mushrooms growing on the trunk of a tree (they looked like fairy food or something: so white and dewy). I can see why people love finding these beauties. It was magical, plucking them from the tree trunk and stuffing them into my pockets. Jason also found some great chanterelles and a chicken of the forest mushroom too. Our group walked around the damp, quiet woods of Mushroomville, Oregon.

There's something foolhearted, I must admit, about going wild mushroom hunting with someone who would eat just about anything “just for the experience”, to say nothing of someone who talked about making a stew out of nothing but the thick flesh of a bright orange Chicken of the Forest mushroom; someone who looked hungry and what was more, believed the world might be about to end. Jason was on the lookout for the elusive psychedelic mushrooms and anything that might be edible, or slightly edible. He found something like a death cap and carefully plucked it from the ground as if we were pilgrim naturalists finding new species and capturing them for historic identification. I now chalk up his enthusiasm for the Death Cap as curiosity, but at the time I wondered slightly if collecting this mushroom was his secret stash- his “Romeo's vile of deadly elixir” in case the world DID happen to end.

Gallerina autumnalis: one of the most dangerous dudes of the bunch.

By the end of my trip, I felt comfortable identifying chanterelles. And though I had a bag full of chanterelles and oysters, I actually didn't eat them because … well, hey, I picked them! Was I ready to put the comfort of my intestines into my own hands? NO! I recognize now that I was pretty paranoid about eating the oyster 'shrooms, even though three people verified that they were indeed edible mushrooms. Why the fear? I think it was something about being lost in the Oregon backwoods with a goofy, novice mushroom hunter and feeling overwhelmed by such fascinating and possibly toxic creatures growing out of dying trees. There's something so fecund about mushroom hunting: fecund and potentially dangerous.

Don't let another fall season go by without trying it yourself, you won't be disappointed (unless you mistake a chantrell for something that upsets your stomach.) The Yachats Mushroom Festival is a great place to start!