There's a charred gray tree branch sticking straight out of the ground in a clearing a couple of miles down a paved Forest Service road from the Deschutes National Forest's Camp Sherman campground. I left it there two weeks ago so I could mark what I thought was a large patch of edible brown mushrooms I came across during my first six-hour trip into the woods as a duly licensed mushroom hunter.
But now that I've had time to think about it, I'm convinced those brown mushrooms were nothing special, or to use an unscientific term in the mushroom picker vocabulary, “generic brown mushrooms” that would neither have killed me nor rewarded my palate with an experience worthy of the time and effort I'd spend collecting them, taking them home and throwing them in a pan with some butter and oil.
My first mushroom-hunting trip, almost six weeks in the making, yielded only a handful of bolete and morel mushrooms that I split with my guides, Julie and Jim Hamilton from the Central Oregon Mushroom Club. And while those mushrooms were better than nothing, they were nothing near the 2½ pounds I needed to make a nice dinner for my wife.
“There's just nothing growing out there,” said Wild Mountain Stand owner Ky Karnecki, who sold me enough mushrooms at his Sisters farm stand to make up for what I needed. “This has to be one of the worst mushroom seasons I've seen in the past 30 years.”
I'd been in town for less than six months when I started hearing people tell stories about how they pulled over to the side of a forest road, took a couple of steps and found themselves ankle-deep in a patch of morel mushrooms that carpeted the area as far as the eye could see. Such stories — though wildly exaggerated, I'm sure — sparked a desire to get out into the woods and see what I could turn up.
But I knew I needed help both to find the best places to go looking for mushrooms and to make sure I didn't eat anything poisonous. A quick Google search led me to the Central Oregon Mushroom Club, a group of amateur mushroom hunters who get together on the fourth Wednesday of each month at the Rosie Bareis Community Campus in Bend (See “If you go”).
But there was one problem — there were no mushrooms. Several planned mushroom-hunting outings with club members got canceled for lack of fungi. Explanations were many: The weather was too cold for mushrooms, it was too hot, there wasn't enough rain, there wasn't enough lightning, it was too damp, it was too dry. I thought I'd never find any mushrooms this spring and almost scrapped my plans to go looking for them.
“It's slim pickings out there,” Julie Hamilton said. “But we aren't giving up and we'll keep going out there until we find some.”
Two weeks later, it had rained, there was some lightning and the temperatures had warmed up. Hamilton also had some free time in her schedule and was ready to take me to a few of her favorite mushroom hunting spots in the Camp Sherman/Metolius River Basin area, provided I didn't tell anyone specifically where the mushrooms were.
She also told me to pack a bag with the necessary mushroom-hunting supplies: water, lunch and snacks; comfortable warm clothing; a paper bag or a basket to carry the mushrooms we harvested; a pocketknife I could use to cut their stems, and a paintbrush to clear any dirt or debris from the mushrooms.
She then stopped by the U.S. Forest Service's Sisters Ranger District office, where I picked up a free forest products permit, which lets people collect up to 2 gallons of mushrooms for personal use each day for 10 days, and a map showing which parts of the forest were off-limits to mushroom picking and which ones promised at least some type of results. (These permits do not apply to matsutakes, a sought-after type of wild mushroom known for its distinct fragrance that comes with its own set of rules and regulations.)
