River Shannon Aloia walks along a remote dirt road in the national forest, beneath rows of fir trees, searching the ground for morels.
“Find it,” she commands her dog, Jasper.
For Aloia, an avid collector, the search paid off when she found and plucked a single honey-colored morel mushroom.
“Foraging transforms your relationship with nature,” she says. “You're using all your senses when you're out in the woods, and there's something so satisfying when you can identify something and bring it home to cook for your family.”
Spring in the Northern Hemisphere is a favorite time of year for foragers like Aloia, and it's especially popular in the American West because there are millions of acres of public land where foragers can roam freely and harvest as they please.
As the snow melts, a variety of fungi begin to emerge, including oyster mushrooms, hericium erinaceum and several types of morels. An abundance of flowers and other edible and medicinal plants, such as wild onions, asparagus, fiddleheads, nettles and miner's lettuce, are also very popular.
Summer brings with it a bounty of berry harvests in the Rocky Mountain West, including chokecherries, wild strawberries and plump purple huckleberries. Late summer and fall bring other wild crops, including Southwestern pinons, pine nuts, lamb's foot mushrooms, shaggy mane mushrooms and the premium matsutake mushroom.
Most national parks prohibit commercial gathering, but about three-quarters allow visitors to explore and gather any crop they like for personal use. Each park sets annual limits, and some, such as Death Valley in California and Nevada, limit gathering of nuts, berries, and other foods to one quart per day for personal consumption only. About one-quarter of national parks prohibit gathering altogether.
But conditions in the forests are changing, worrying the foragers who have long enjoyed the seasonal flavors of wild-grown foods and whose forager lifestyles are tied to their centuries-old dependence on natural habitats.
Collecting has become so popular since the pandemic that state and federal agencies are considering whether to impose additional regulations.
Some major personal and commercial food collectors say more public lands are being designated off-limits, especially in areas where wildfires have ravaged forested areas.
Officials' concern comes as they are drawing attention to a surprising ecological phenomenon: Scorched landscapes and barren land provide ideal conditions for the morels to grow in abundance. Authorities say the morels flock to burnt areas in increasing numbers every spring after the previous year's devastating forest fires, causing food populations to grow out of control.
“Here in Oregon, we rarely shut down any burns before the pandemic,” said Trent Blizzard, president of the North American Mycological Society, who runs the website The Modern Forager with his wife, Kristen, “but over the last three or four years, we've shut down most fires, even the larger ones.”
“We're concerned about collection access on all state and federal lands, not just slash-and-burn areas,” he said. Decisions about where and when to close national forests are made at the local level. David Lawrence, special products program manager for the U.S. Forest Service, said controlling commercial harvest of products is often a low priority. Some collectors who sell food products are required to obtain a permit.
“The first step is to ensure sustainable management,” he said, which might require historical and environmental analysis of commercial mushroom picking, or deploying law enforcement to manage the large crowds that could lead to closures without adequate resources.
“I've seen that as an obstacle to granting permission,” he said.
It is not uncommon for hundreds of commercial collectors to gather to harvest large quantities of matsutake; Oregon matsutake harvests have attracted thousands of people.
David Haupt, an official with the U.S. Forest Service's regional office that includes Montana, Idaho, parts of North Dakota and Washington state, said no commercial mushroom harvesting permits have been issued this year, in part because of the large crowds that have gathered to harvest mushrooms in the past. “Reducing the potential for environmental damage is the No. 1 consideration when evaluating applications for commercial harvesting permits,” Haupt said.
Other dangers are also of concern, particularly since all morels grown in the United States are wild-harvested, not cultivated.
Montana health officials warned residents in May about the dangers of morels after a series of illnesses and deaths. In spring 2023, 50 people in Bozeman fell ill and two died, likely due to morels grown in China and shipped to local restaurants. A Missoula lawyer died after eating morels he picked during a riverboat trip.
Morels contain a toxic compound called hydrazine, and other mushrooms may be poisonous as well. In the United States, few deaths occur from the deadly mushrooms, although dozens of people become ill and recover each year.
Dennis E. Desjardins, a professor emeritus at San Francisco State University who has studied fungal ecology and evolution for more than 40 years, said vendors of wild mushrooms should include instructions on how to consume them.
“The FDA should require posted warnings that wild mushrooms, especially morels, are poisonous if eaten raw and must be thoroughly cooked before eating,” he said.
While mushroom hunting, and especially mushroom hunting, is not a new pastime, the pandemic has intensified demand for outdoor experiences, with traffic volumes soaring and discoveries of mushroom-rich areas spreading via social media.
“There's been an explosion in the number of people foraging for food,” Aloia says. “Everyone wants to go to places that are easy to get to, and those places disappear, and they just move on to the next place and the next place.”
Aloia, who manages a Facebook group dedicated to mushroom foraging, said newcomers don't always understand the unspoken etiquette of mushroom foraging, and often take to social media to share the locations of mushroom-rich “nectar holes,” or trespass on public lands that others have long considered sacred secrets.
“There's a lot of abuse of rights,” she said.
“Social media has flattened the learning curve for what was once arcane knowledge that took years to gather,” said Langdon Cook, a Seattle-area mushroom-hunting instructor and author of “Master Mushroom Forager.”“, Books about An underground subculture of commercial foragers. “Even a first-time forager can take coordinates and find a species of mushroom that in the past might have taken an amateur a year to figure out.”
The out-of-control crowds have prompted some to take action to curb the mushroom pickers. In response to the surge, Salt Point, the only state park in California that allows mushroom picking, recently lowered the picking limit from five pounds to two pounds per person. Minnesota is also considering new restrictions on picking mushrooms for personal use in state parks.
Climate change is also upending some aspects of mushroom abundance: “The number of species and the abundance are declining significantly,” says Dr Desjardins. “It's getting drier and the seasons are coming later.”
This is the time of year when morels and other foraged ingredients make their way to the dinner table.
“The season is just starting, so morels are on a lot of menus,” says chef Chris DiMaio of Whitefish, Montana. “I went out and picked a few pounds a few days ago, so I'll be incorporating them into my menu this weekend.”
Urban foraging has also long been popular: Famed “wildman” Steve Brill has been teaching the practice in Central Park for decades, while a group in Los Angeles called Hollywood Orchard collects abundant and often-wasted fruit, preserves it in makeshift kitchens, and donates it to local charities.
Indigenous and Native American tribes have long practiced foraging as a way to promote healthy diets and as part of the food sovereignty movement to revive traditional foods, and some research suggests that eating wild foods can provide essential nutrients.
“The hope with food sovereignty is that we can put back on the table the healthy foods and ancestral foods that we've relied on to survive for thousands of years,” said Jill Falcon LaMacher, an assistant professor of community nutrition and sustainable food systems at Montana State University.
Sean Sherman, a Sioux chef and founder of the Native American restaurant Owamuni in Minneapolis, is one of those adapting foraged ingredients for modern tastes.
“We're not cooking like it's 1491,” Sherman said in an interview with NPR's “Fresh Air,” referring to the time before European colonization. Two signature dishes that use the ingredient are roast turkey with berry mint sauce and black walnuts, and wild rice pilaf with wild mushrooms, cranberries and chestnuts.
Mushrooms still attract the most attention from the foraging community: “Everybody wants to find mushrooms these days,” says Cook, the Seattle forager and author.. “They're sexy, they're fashionable, and they're symbols of foraging.”
Fungi play an important role in nature and have a symbiotic relationship with forests. Some fungi originate from huge webs of hyphae that weave around tree roots. The hyphae collect water and nutrients, transporting them to the tree in exchange for sugars. Mushrooms burst above ground and release wind-borne spores as part of their mycelial reproduction. Other fungi break down dead plant material, providing large amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen to growing tree roots.
As long as the underground mycelium is not damaged, mushroom picking does not harm forests or future mushroom harvests. “The only negative impact is that it removes a food source for many of the insects and other small animals that eat mushrooms, including deer,” Dr Desjardins said.
Foraged produce can be pricey: At Far West Fungi, a popular San Francisco mushroom shop, wild chanterelles were recently selling for $32 a pound, compared with $56 a pound for porcini and $36 a pound for morels.
Another valuable and very tasty mushroom is the Matsutake. Matsutake has a unique scent that many describe as a combination of dirty socks and red hot candy. Others say the smell is reminiscent of cinnamon with subtle floral and citrus nuances. Matsutake grow in the pine forests of the West and can be picked from early September to early November on public lands under pine needles and forest leaf litter under pine trees. The national forest near Chemult, Oregon is one of the best places for pickers from all over the country to come and pick Matsutake during the two-month long season.
Cook writes about seasonal mushroom trails in the West that are used by itinerant gatherers.
If you draw a circle from the Pacific Northwest through British Columbia and the Yukon, “you can pick mushrooms somewhere within that circle every day of the year,” Cook said.
