A mushroom outing...

Feht came by around 9 am for our outing. Galina was not feeling very well, so Feht, his wife Maria, and I set off to hunt mushrooms at the local "top of the world," located at Lobo Point up above the Wolf Creek Pass.

Once we left the highway, Feht slowed down to a crawl while Maria and I peered out of our car windows, looking for signs of mushrooms. Such signs were easy to spot.

There were mushrooms all over the forest floor. Unfortunately, most of them were of the gilled variety, and I am not too skilled at telling one such variety from another, unless it happens to be the Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria). Here's a shot of a group of such mushrooms, which are fairly easy to identify owing to their bright red color and traces of the membrane from the volva on the cap.


The Russian name of this mushroom - or of the variety of this mushroom that occurs in Russia - is мухомор, a name that means "fly exterminator." It turns out that multiple cultures discovered that this mushroom could be used to help control fly populations by dissolving the mushroom in something that normally attracts flies, like milk.

Aside from the red Amanitas, I did run across a number of quite edible (and large) boletes in the forest, such as the specimen below.


We spent about two hours going up and down the road between Highway 160 and Lobo Point. I collected a bunch of boletes, a couple of specimens of Hawk's Wing (Sarcodon imbricatum), and a box full of coral mushrooms, as I was under the impression such mushrooms were edible. We also brought back some specimens of some unknown mushrooms that we intended to look up in the one and only field guide I could find (I think the rest are packed).

After we had had enough of the great outdoors, we went back to town, stopped at the market for some provisions, and then went to the house where I peeled and boiled potatoes while Maria cleaned some of our haul and Feht tried to key out our unknown mushrooms. None of the individual specimens we took showed promise, and we chucked the coral mushrooms as our handbook indicated that a number of varieties that grow on the ground are poisonous.

A few minutes later, we sat down to a fine repast and were joined by Galina. Then I went downstairs to find our dehydrator, clean it, and load it with a first "charge" of cleaned and sliced mushrooms.

Cheers...