{"id":38729,"date":"2022-08-22T18:01:15","date_gmt":"2022-08-23T00:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-mushroom-forays-improved-by-monsoons-are-becoming-more-popular\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T02:46:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T08:46:11","slug":"colorado-mushroom-forays-improved-by-monsoons-are-becoming-more-popular","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-mushroom-forays-improved-by-monsoons-are-becoming-more-popular\/","title":{"rendered":"Colorado mushroom forays, improved by monsoons, are becoming more popular"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mushroom
Mushroom foragers, from left, Shannon Adams, Noah Siegel and Jon Sommer, investigate the genus of a mushroom while heading into the Mount Evans Wilderness on Aug. 12 near Bailey. The foray was organized by the Colorado Mycological Society. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

BAILEY \u2013 Jon Sommer is standing in the shade of a spruce forest holding a white mushroom with a golden-yellow cap to his nose. He smells it. Not like a sniff, more like he nearly shoves it up a nostril and inhales audibly.<\/p>\n

To most, the mushroom smells like, well, a mushroom. Or maybe the earth from which it\u2019s just been plucked, because it still has dirt on it.<\/p>\n

But not to Sommer, leader of a group of more than 1,000 Colorado fungi-seekers who meet for weekend mushroom forays and travel to fungi festivals around the state. They are the Colorado Mycological Society, meaning they study fungi, and their club is connected to the Denver Botanic Gardens.<\/p>\n

To Sommer, the mushroom in his palm smells like almonds.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an Agaricus didymus, he says, a delicious relative of the cremini mushrooms sold in grocery stores.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are lovely to eat,\u201d says Sommer, before launching into a detailed, scientific explanation of how this genus of mushroom grows in a symbiotic relationship with spruce needles. \u201cPeople just want to know, \u2018Can I eat it?\u2019 But I want people to understand the whole biology, their role in the ecosystem and all of that stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

He and his fellow fungi experts and experts-in-training, who recently met at a trailhead of the Mount Evans Wilderness carrying baskets and backpacks with special mushroom separators, are so obsessed with mushrooms they could talk about them for hours. Here\u2019s one reason: In the Rocky Mountain region, there are an estimated 5,000 species of mushrooms, which are the fruit \u2013 the blooming part \u2013 of fungi.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are symbiotic with the roots of the trees,\u201d said Sommer, who gives weeknight training sessions in Denver before leading people into the forest. \u201cWe call that whole relationship mycorrhiza \u2013 mycro meaning fungus and risa meaning root. Ninety-five percent of all land plants have mycorrhizae in nature. And they can\u2019t live without the fungus. A cubic inch of forest soil could have 5 miles of fungal cells. In one cubic inch!\u201d<\/p>\n

Some fungi are connected with spruce trees, some with aspens, feeding off the trees that in exchange get phosphorus and nitrogen from the fungi. Others are connected to other mushrooms or decomposing bodies. Or poop.<\/p>\n

The foray group, which numbered about 10, left the forest with dozens of varieties of mushrooms \u2013 most to display at a botanic gardens mushroom fair and a few to saute in butter for dinner.<\/p>\n

The hobby is increasing in popularity in Colorado, in part because the pandemic sent more people outside but also because last year was the best mushroom year in the Rocky Mountains in at least 30 years, which is as long as Sommer has been hunting Colorado shrooms.<\/p>\n

The monsoon of 2021 created an epic mushroom season, which hits its prime in August. It was so good that Sommer keeps having to remind people who got hooked on foraging last year that 2021 was an anomaly.<\/p>\n

\"A
A truncate coral. (Photos by Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"A
A Hydnellum aurantiacum. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>
Taste, don\u2019t eat<\/div>\n

This season is still great, thanks to late-summer rain, but it doesn\u2019t compare to last year.<\/p>\n

No matter to Tim Jansen and his wife, Alicia Torres, who used to spend weekends panning for gold but are now addicted to learning about mushrooms. The Denver residents have been joining forays, watching YouTube videos and reading about fungi for the last year or so \u2013 ever since accidentally finding their first valuable mushroom, an elusive morel. The meaty mushroom, which is said to taste like nuts, pushes out of the sooty earth after wildfires and is selling for $35 a pound this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was panning for gold and my wife found a morel behind us that was worth more than any of the gold I\u2019ve found in the time I\u2019ve been here,\u201d said Jansen, who works in the technology division of a marketing firm.<\/p>\n

Torres has a particular knack for spying mushrooms in the woods, noticing even a tiny disruption in the pine needles or an uneven leaf, then brushing the forest floor aside to expose mushroom caps. Torres once found a rare truffle near Guanella Pass that they were told was worth about $1,000 per pound. Torres and Jansen are not experts yet, but they both know a ton about fungus.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will literally taste any mushroom in the forest without being scared of it,\u201d Jansen said. \u201cI was afraid to smell them before. I didn\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Important note: He said taste, not swallow.<\/p>\n

Some are spicy like a hot pepper. Some are bitter. One supposedly tastes like tutti-frutti, a sweet and savory mix of fruits and nuts.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not a mushroom in the wilds of Colorado that would seriously harm a person who smells or tastes it and spits it out, but there are quite a few that will bring about serious gastrointestinal issues if swallowed, according to mycological society foragers with lived experience. \u201cFalse morels,\u201d which look like the prized edible mushrooms, are hazardous to those who can\u2019t tell the difference.<\/p>\n

Mushroom foraging is fascinating, Jansen said, because there is so much still undiscovered about fungi. Of millions of types of fungi in the world, only about 100,000 are named. It wasn\u2019t until the 1960s that scientists even realized fungi wasn\u2019t part of the plant kingdom but its own category of living things. Now, cutting-edge research is focused on genetics \u2013 and foragers can help by collecting as many kinds of mushrooms as they can find.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re trying to identify what is the difference between this continent\u2019s mushrooms and that continent\u2019s mushrooms that look exactly the same,\u201d Jansen said. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018We thought they were exactly the same, but oh wait, they have different compounds. We were telling everybody these were edible, but who knows, they might cause liver damage after 16 years of eating them every day.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so new of a science that even a citizen can be a leading scientist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Suillus
Suillus brevipes, left, and Sarcodon imbricatum, right. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>
The mushroom savant<\/div>\n

Take Noah Siegal, of Massachusetts, who knows more about mushrooms than perhaps anyone on the continent. His fans call him a mushroom savant.<\/p>\n

Seigal, who joined the Colorado foragers this month ahead of a fungi talk for the Colorado Mycological Society, has no formal degree in fungi but has been studying mushrooms since he was 7 years old, or 33 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI played around with it as a kid and then kept going as a teenager, and before I knew it, I was too good to stop,\u201d said Seigal, who wrote \u201cMushrooms of the Redwood Coast\u201d and is working on another book about mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n

Siegal has named 10 to 15 mushrooms so far by publishing scientific papers on previously undescribed mushrooms. Only about half the mushrooms of the world even have names. \u201cI want to know what every mushroom is,\u201d he said in the forest as, one by one, Colorado foragers thrust a mushroom in front of Siegal\u2019s face and asked him to identify it.<\/p>\n

To name a mushroom, a scientist has to know every type of mushroom in that group of mushrooms, and there are hundreds. \u201cSo that\u2019s difficult,\u201d Seigal said. \u201cBut what you can do is compare with specialists in that group and say, \u2018Hey, I have this species and I\u2019m fairly certain it\u2019s new. Have you seen this before?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Fungi is Siegal\u2019s full-time job, and he gets paid enough to live by taking speaking engagements around the country. He hunts for mushrooms across the United States and Canada, and as far as New Zealand and Australia.<\/p>\n

\u201cI live pretty cheaply,\u201d he said. \u201cThe advantage is I get to travel around the world and not have to pay for it. I love never being home, except when it\u2019s mushroom season there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Siegal also has built a reputation as a mushroom photographer, gathering fans on Instagram, where he identifies himself as a \u201cnomadic mycologist.\u201d In one of his most viral photos, the claw of a dead opossum clutches a purple space-ship-like mushroom called a Laccaria amethystina.<\/p>\n

\"Tim
Tim Jansen, at front, and Alicia Torres began foraging for mushrooms several years ago while panning for gold. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The focus of the foray was to collect as many unique samples of mushrooms as possible in three hours for a recent fair at the Denver Botanic Gardens. The group collected not only the mushrooms, but a bit of the earth, log, pine needles or whatever the mushroom was growing on in the woods.<\/p>\n

They followed a trail up Deer Creek, but it wasn\u2019t a hike. Instead, they were off trail every few feet upon spotting a mushroom, then squatting to dig it from the ground. Most carried special mushroom foraging knives with a blade on one end to slice the stem and a brush on the other to cast off dirt.<\/p>\n

As the morning passed, each filled their basket or plastic tray organizer with mushrooms \u2013 porcinis with burnt-orange caps, tall white corals that look like they belong in the ocean, and gray puffballs that spew a dust of spores when squished. Hawk\u2019s wings mushrooms, which have a cap that resembles brown and white feathers, were easy to find, then tucked into backpacks to saute later. Always with butter. Sometimes with garlic salt.<\/p>\n

Psychedelic mushrooms sold in Colorado aren\u2019t growing in the wild around here. They\u2019re grown commercially, more easily cultivated than other kinds of mushrooms because they are decomposers and grow on other materials, including dung.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t need a relationship with the trees.<\/p>\n

The same is true for mushrooms commonly found in the grocery store, including cremini, portobellos and shiitakes.<\/p>\n

One of the best finds of the foray was a Hydnellum suaveolens mushroom, which smelled not at all like a mushroom or dirt. Its scent is sweet but light, definitely pleasant and hard to describe. \u201cI call this one the air freshener,\u201d Sommer said. \u201cPut it in your car and leave it there for like a week.\u201d Even he can\u2019t describe its scent. \u201cThere\u2019s no connection with other plants or animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Agota
Agota Aczel and Calvin Davis sniff-test fungi during a morning forage with the Colorado Mycological Society. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>
\u2018Tastes like bacon\u2019<\/div>\n

Agota Aczel, the most enthusiastic of the foragers, had a mushroom book, a foray knife and plastic bags to store mushrooms tucked into her wicker basket. At the sight of a purple mushroom, or a pink one, a phallic one, or one shaped like a flower, she would suck in a breath and say, \u201cOh my gosh!\u201d<\/p>\n

Aczel, originally from Hungary and now living in Aurora, sometimes gets teary while taking in the delicate details of a mushroom. She oohs and ahhs when another mushroom expert Siegel shows her a mushroom that he says smells of \u201crancid flour.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m totally not outdoorsy,\u201d said Aczel, who got into mushrooms just before the pandemic. \u201cI only come for the mushrooms. I usually cry. They\u2019re so beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

She once found a large, meaty bolete, which she cooked in butter. \u201cIt tasted like bacon,\u201d she said. \u201cOh my gosh, it\u2019s the best.\u201d<\/p>\n

Calvin Davis, who works in cybersecurity for the U.S. Air Force, started foraging with his mom 10 years ago, when he was a kid. He doesn\u2019t know the names of many mushrooms, but enjoys the weekend forays in the woods. And he can identify mushrooms well enough to know which are good to eat \u2013 most of the time.<\/p>\n

On a backpacking trip in the Sangre de Cristos, though, Davis found a bolete he thought was safe. \u201cI ate it. And I threw up all night. For hours,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a dumb move on my part.\u201d Turns out he ate an aspen bolete, which in Colorado only grows with aspen trees and makes some people sick. Davis thought it was a different mushroom, the kind that grows under spruce trees.<\/p>\n

The number of Coloradans who have discovered mushroom hunting in the last two years has doubled the membership in the mycological society to more than 1,000 and filled up training classes in rapid order. Sommer\u2019s evening courses, which he teaches in borrowed space at Saint Joseph Hospital, were capped at 30 people and filled up within three hours. He bumped the cap to 48 people and hit that, too.<\/p>\n

Sommer, who recently retired after a long career in real estate, now does mushrooms full time as a hobby, volunteering his time to lead the club and teach others.<\/p>\n

\"In
In the Rocky Mountain region, there are an estimated 5,000 species of mushrooms, including this Laccaria bicolor poking from the moss in Mount Evans Wilderness. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

He\u2019s made three recent trips to the burn scar left by the 2021 Sylvan Lake Fire, southeast of Eagle, to hunt for morels, collecting 50 pounds. He freeze-dries them, eats them and gives them to friends. He met another forager there who gathered 50 pounds in a day and sold them for $35 per pound \u2013 which is $1,750.<\/p>\n

While in Eagle to attend a mushroom festival this month, Sommer found a rare Amanita barrowsii, a \u201creally beautiful, pinkish-orange\u201d mushroom he had never seen before. \u201cIt\u2019s always exciting for me, given I\u2019ve done this for 45 years, to see a mushroom I haven\u2019t seen before,\u201d he said. \u201cLike wow, isn\u2019t that fun?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Colorado Sun is a reader-supported, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to covering Colorado issues. To learn more, go to coloradosun.com.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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