Urban Outcast Music #60 - Old Gods by Emily Scott Robinson
May 30th, 2023: The family was returning on Hwy 2 from a Memorial weekend at the property when we spotted suspected mushroom hunters coming back to their truck. We were passing the site of last year's Bolt Creek Fire, the first major western Washington fire I could remember. That got me pondering why I wasn't taking advantage of a pretty rare chance to hunt for burn morels so close to home.
The next morning I was back in the mountains trying to find public access into the burn. For a fire that covered almost 15,000 acres, there is very little road access with a good chunk of it in wilderness (no harvest allowed) and even some road closures that included no pedestrians because... who knows. I eventually had to settle for parking on the side of the highway and headed uphill.
The first thing I noticed was a slight, pleasant hint of campfire that was lingering seven months after the rains extinguished the blaze. The second thing I noticed was boot tracks everywhere. You couldn't take five steps without seeing indisputable evidence that someone had already passed through. What I couldn't tell was if they had been successful. I tried crawling through more forbidding looking snarls just to see more tracks when I emerged on the far side. Plan B was trying to find somewhere so unpleasant that recreational harvesters with good sense wouldn't bother.
It took me a couple hours to slowly work up a dry creek to escape tracks and to discover that there was water after all, just subsurface for most of its course. Beyond the waterfall I could see some more extreme country that beckoned for some serious scrambling but I needed to be back in time for daycare pickup and had to put it out of mind as a probably never hike... all those crisped trees are going to fall soon and suck all the joy out of an exploration for many years to come.
By now I was almost three hours into the hike with these little red blobs as the only fungi spotted. The little bit of greenery really pops and it was interesting to observe how all the thin barked cedars were toast while speculating why one douglas fir survived when his neighbors didn't. I've never gotten the chance to walk through a recent burn before but I highly recommend it.
After lunch at the micro falls, I tried climbing out of the creek a couple times but the sides were so steep that I didn't even want to find morels there. I was almost all the way out of the tight canyon when I spotted what looked like a bench area 100' above me. Low morale was definitely factoring into my internal debate but it also looked like the kind of feature others might have missed so I gave it a try. 
On top it looked just like the area I left but crucially, there were zero boot tracks and lots of morels!!! As a true noob, I was taking pictures of almost every shroom discovered. Each one of these tasty morsels looks like a sculpture to me and I can't decide if the black or blonde is more picturesque.
Morels are hollow and pretty dry compared to their squishy cousins so a full bag only worked out to just over four pounds. At $50/lb at the local grocery store, it was a very productive day. Besides their beauty and earthy goodness, I love morels for resisting cultivation. Every morel you find in the store was harvested in the wild and almost all are from burn areas where they predictably show up in higher densities. 
Our favorite prep is just butter, salt, and heat until they finally start to brown. The five year old wasn't a fan but the three year old could finish a pan's worth if you turned your back on him. That got us through about half of the haul and then I fired up a couple rounds of the dehydrator to get through the rest. Now the challenge is getting through quarts of dried morels and oysters before I need those jars for all the fall shrooms. Lobster and summer chantarelles are supposedly out there now (mid-July) but I haven't found them yet. Happy searching!
Not sure how good the upload quality will be but if you want to play a mini-morel hunt, there are at least 5 in the shot above (not counting the one on my bag). Just as I was getting used to picking out the correct black smudges it was time to run, literally, down the mountain. The yield for the trip was maybe 8 oz but I had a gps pin and would be back soon.
June 1st, 2023: Rushed to my spot as soon as I dropped off the kids only to find it full of construction vehicles... They were preemptively cutting toasted trees back from the power lines. With no legal parking for about a mile and no shoulders on the highway for walking back to the spot, I was feeling doomed. Out of desperation I asked the crew if I could join them and they were kind enough to let me snuggle between their work rigs (and they didn't drop any trees onto my truck)!
The practice day paid off big time and the bag was steadily filling over my four hours of picking. So many morels that I didn't even need to pick the one below:
I haven't checked with someone that knows better but I was finding all my black/grey morels around douglas fir trees and all the blondies were associating with cedar trees. The whole day was spent in less than a three acre area so I can only imagine how many mushrooms were harvested by others out of the miles of ground I covered on the first day.
P.S. - My dehydrator grew gills! I don't know if the morels or oysters are responsible but when I inspected the central fan it was densely coated in spores that had oriented themselves into a vertical set of gills. The fan is plastic and smooth so the microscopic spores were organizing into their own macro structures. Kicking myself for not documenting but I expect I'll have another sample by next spring at the latest.