Autumn’s Super Bloom
It’s been a wet one by recent early autumnal metrics, a banner year for chanterelles. Each wave of rain and streak of humidity pushes a new round up through the loam, and Alex and I have made a sport of seeing how many new patches we can identify while the conditions are prime.
A week ago we found such a new spot, one that was so good that it left our baskets spilling over with more than half of what we found left on the ground. We dropped pins on our Google maps and named them clever/nerdy things like “Watch Your Step!” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”
We buried our noses in our baskets and huffed their aroma. Earthy and sweet feel too flat as descriptors. Nothing else smells like a basket of fresh chanterelles. They defy description. “This is what the color orange smells like to me,” Alex said between huffs, which might be as close as one can get.
Chanterelles, because of their flavor and proliferation, are an easy favorite. They’re distinct, easy to spot, easy to learn. I wandered through the same forest several days later. The day was drawing to a close, but I was with a friend new to mushroom hunting who was eager to use every minute of daylight left to us. I talked through my process as we walked.
When we first entered the forest, the trees were all of one species and tightly packed together. They were so dense nothing was growing on the forest floor. There might be some fungal growth in that soil, but safe to say, it wasn’t teeming with life. These weren’t the conditions we were looking for.
Once we entered a stand of trees that was more diverse in age and species, I slowed down and began paying more attention. I was looking for stands of trees that included somewhat mature fir. The base of a big fir tree is a great place to start looking for chanterelles. They like loamy, light soil, and are often found in brambles of evergreen huckleberries, or under the drooping arms and legs of salal. Any semi-open, semi-maturely treed hillside is worth looking at carefully.
With this information I followed him around, watching him pick up every mushroom he saw initially, until he found the prize we were after. We examined the chanterelle carefully, its rudimentary gills, its firm stalk, its velvety cap, the blurred distinction between the two.
We examined the false chanterelle. They’re convincing from above, and they grow in the same places in which true chanterelles are found. But the cap is slimy and lacks the velvety quality of the chanterelle, and if you’re looking carefully has a faint bullseye marking. The false chanterelle’s underside has distinct, deep gills. With a chanterelle in his basket and a side by side comparison with a false chanterelle under his belt his eye was honed.
In forty five minutes of focused attention on one area, he’d amassed a beautiful handful. We reoriented ourselves and made our way back to the trail, continuing on its loop toward the park’s entrance.
The trail made a wide circle and gradually came into hillier terrain. We slowed again and I began looking upslope, squinting in the gathering dusk for the telltale flares. We had intended on being done for the day, but these conditions looked too good to pass up. We scrambled off trail again, climbing the duffy hillside.
I saw the stumps of my three days previous harvest just as I heard my friend shout, “Hey! These are great!” We’d found our way to the same slope Alex and I had just filled up on. I caught up to him and told him as much, pointing out the remnants of the mushrooms we’d harvested already.
“We left a lot behind though,” I said. “We’d filled our baskets and run out of time, so there’s a lot here still. And there’s a lot of area we didn’t even get to explore if you just keep wandering up this hill.”
We did that, fanning out on the slope, slowly working our way up. I tunneled into leggy hucks and carefully stepped through patches of blowdown. I harvested armfulls in wide arcs around my body. The abundance was unbelievable.
“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy.” Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words come to me every time I find myself harvesting bounty like this. Especially here in this forest – a patchwork quilt of paltry second and third growth, choked on its margins with invasive species and plagued by unhealthy density. Even so, when given a chance (and a few dousings), this degraded patch of earth erupts in chanterelles each fall.
I heard my friend hoot with glee from the short distance between us. These were the best conditions one could hope for on a first foray into the woods for chanterelles, and he was duly delighted.
My basket filled quickly. I kept adding more, wiggling it to settle them in place and create room. When that stopped working, I began mounding them. I was still leaving most of what I was finding behind.
We spent the week giving mushrooms away. To the friend of a neighbor who gifted us a huge cedar tree; to the friends who invited us for a dinner sail on Puget Sound from Eagle Harbor one bright, crisp day; to the new friend and neighbor who is generously sharing his mill and trailer with us; to the friend who sat at our kitchen table chatting with me while I dry sauteed the remaining fifteen pounds of chanterelles over the course of five hours one evening.
It’s rained again since and I’m ready to head out once more. Autumn’s woodland ephemerals are having a super bloom year.
(May these same conditions nourish a super bloom in us all.)
