WENATCHEE — This year’s morel mushroom season got off to a late start, but in North Central Washington, it’s proving to be bigger than anyone predicted.
So far, 1,741 people have bought commercial permits to pick morels. That’s twice as many as the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest sold in 2007, the year after the 175,000-acre Tripod Fire, a banner year for commercial mushroom permit sales.
Morels come out best the year after a wildfire, and big commercial pickers follow the big fires.
Employees at the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest know that, so after last summer’s major fires — including the Table Mountain Fire and the Wenatchee Complex — they prepared for an onslaught.
The commercial pickers send scouts before deciding where to send their pickers, and this year, it was beginning to look like they went somewhere else.
By mid-April, no one showed up.
“We put all this work into just the planning, and then nothing,” said Alex Martinez, special products project lead for the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. “Internally, there were even experts predicting there may not be much of a mushroom season. When we heard that, it took the wind right out of our sails,” he said.
But suddenly, in the last couple days of April and first week of May, they started to come. “I would say it was extremely heavy well through July 14,” Martinez said.
Last week, the number of people coming in for a permit started to decline. But it’s not over yet, he said.
Martinez said after experiencing some problems with garbage and dispersed camping during the 2007 mushroom hunting season, they did a few things differently this time.
Those changes included requiring all commercial mushroom pickers to camp at designated spots, if they were camping on the national forest, and putting out dumpsters and portable toilets at every camp.
The Forest Service also made signs and fliers in several languages, as many of the pickers don’t speak English, but may speak a variety of languages, including Cambodian, Vietnamese, Spanish, he said.
They also make permits purchased at any district valid throughout the forest. So anyone buying a season’s permit in Cle Elum could later pick mushrooms at Entiat. That cut down on the long early-morning lines at ranger districts throughout the forest, he said.
Permits cost $20 for four days, $50 for a month, or $100 for the season.
“We wanted to make it attractive for the users and keep the cost as low as we possibly could and I think we did a really good job of that,” Martinez said.
“For many of these people it’s a business, or it supplements what they make. They are really hard working. Some of them are hiking as much as 15 to 20 miles a day,” he said. “Hopefully, they made a profit.”
Forest Service spokesman Roland Giller said at least some of those who came this year earned a pretty healthy income.
He said one man from Portland that he talked to near the Devil’s Gulch Trailhead told him he was making $1,500 a day.
