Searching for chanterelles

I am not a mushroom or foraging expert, so none of the following should be used as guidance for identifying, collecting, or consuming mushrooms or plants.

The last time I foraged for fall mushrooms was in 2020. A combination of search and rescue obligations and general life commitments have precluded forage weekends the last couple of years. I also prefer to forage with company, which has been increasingly difficult to schedule.

Today, I decided the fall sunshine, holiday weekend (for government employees, anyway), and amount of time since I’ve been able to forage was enough motivation to get back out there and seek some fungi.

Obviously, I’m not going to share my foraging location (it has nonetheless become more crowded than I remember, especially when compared to my first visit around 15 years ago), but it was decidedly less productive today than in years past. That might be the result of weather, the area’s growing popularity among foragers, my own rusty foraging skills, or a combination.

Ironically, I noticed pink flagging tape I suspect remained after our team responded to a search and rescue call in the area (for a missing mushroom forager) last year. Our team’s technique for attaching flagging tape, which we use to mark the boundaries of grid search lines, is simple but unique—we use a girth hitch to attach the tape. I wasn’t on that particular mission, and others may use the same technique when foraging or timber cruising, but it seemed a reasonable assumption that is was our team’s tape¹.

After 6 miles walking and a few hours of foraging, I came back with just a handful of the golden beauties. But I needed the time in the woods, by myself this time, to be present and pay attention. The best part of a forage is simply being in one’s body and forced to focus on something outside oneself.

Today was a good day.