River Shannon walks along a remote dirt road on Aloya National Forest land, beneath a row of pine trees, looking for morel trees on the ground.
“Find it,” she orders her dog Jasper.
For Ms. Aloia, an avid hunter, the search is successful: She spots a solitary honey-colored morel, and plucks it.
“Foraging changes your relationship with nature,” he said. “You use all of your senses in the woods. And when you identify something and take it home and cook it for your family, it's very satisfying.”
Spring in the Northern Hemisphere is a favorite time of year for foragers like Ms. Aloia. It's especially popular in the American West because millions of acres of publicly owned land give foragers the freedom to roam and harvest as they please.
After the snow melts, many kinds of fungi begin to grow above ground – oyster mushrooms, king boletes and many kinds of morels. The abundance of flowers and other edible and medicinal plants, including wild onions and asparagus, fiddleheads, nettles and miner's lettuce, are also in great demand.
As summer approaches, the berry harvest in the Rocky Mountain West begins to be in demand: chokecherries, wild strawberries and plump, purple huckleberries. In late summer and fall, other wild crops grow, such as pinons, or pine nuts, in the Southwest and mushrooms such as chicken of the woods, shaggy manes and the prized matsutake.
Although most national parks prohibit commercial grazing, about three-quarters allow people to forage and gather their favorite crops for personal use. Individual parks set limits each year, such as Death Valley in California and Nevada Limit the collection of foods such as nuts and berries to one quarter of a day, and only for personal consumption. Foraging is completely prohibited in about a quarter of national parks.
But things are changing in the forests, worrying people who have for years enjoyed seasonal food grown in the forests and foraged for food for centuries, dependent on natural habitats.
Foraging has become so popular since the pandemic began that state and federal agencies are considering whether to impose additional restrictions.
Some leading food gatherers, both personal and commercial, say more and more public lands are being declared no-go areas, especially where wildfires have devastated forest lands.
Their concern is based on a growing popular fascination with a surprising ecological phenomenon: Burned landscapes and disturbed grounds provide ideal conditions for morels to thrive in abundance. Officials say this has attracted huge numbers of morels who flock to the burned land in the spring after last year's major wildfires, and the number of people coming in search of pasture has become too great to handle.
“Here in Oregon, before the pandemic they rarely closed burn sites,” said Trent Blizzard, president of North American Mycological AssociationJoe, along with his wife, Kristen Modern Foragers Website“But for the last three or four years, they’ve put out most of the fires, including all the big ones.”
“We're concerned about grazier access to all state and federal lands, not just areas that are burned,” he said. Decisions on where and when to close national forest lands are made at the local level. Managing commercial harvesting of any product is often low on the list of priorities, said David Lawrence, special products program manager for the U.S. Forest Service's national office. Some graziers who sell their feed are required to obtain permits.
“The first step is to ensure sustainable management,” he said. This could require historical and environmental analysis for commercial mushroom picking, or the deployment of law enforcement to manage large crowds, which could lead to closures if there aren’t adequate resources.
“I've seen this become a barrier to granting permits,” he said.
It is not uncommon for hundreds of commercial pickers to come and harvest large quantities of burnt morels. Thousands of people come to harvest matsutake in Oregon.
David Hopt, an official with the U.S. Forest Service regional office that covers Montana, Idaho, parts of North Dakota and Washington state, said no commercial permits have been issued for mushroom gathering this year, partly because of the large crowds that gathered in the past. “Minimizing potential environmental damage is the most important consideration when evaluating applications for commercial permits,” he said.
Other threats have also raised concerns, particularly because all morels produced in the United States are gathered from the wild, not farmed.
in May, Montana Health officials warn residents Concerns about the dangers of morels followed a series of illnesses and deaths. In the spring of 2023, 50 people in Bozeman became sick and two died, apparently from morels that were grown in China and shipped to a local restaurant. A Missoula lawyer died during a river rafting trip when he ate morels he had gathered.
Morels contain a toxic compound called hydrazine, and other mushrooms can be poisonous as well. In the United States, there are a few deaths each year from deadly mushrooms, although dozens of people get sick and recover each year.
Denis E. Desjardins, a professor emeritus at San Francisco State University who has studied the ecology and evolution of fungi for more than 40 years, said sellers of wild mushrooms should include instructions on how to consume them.
“The FDA should issue a warning that wild mushrooms must be thoroughly cooked before eating, especially morel mushrooms, which can be toxic if eaten raw,” he said.
Though mushroom hunting, especially for mushroom pickers, is not a new pastime, the pandemic has fueled the search for outdoor experiences. Traffic has increased and the search for bountiful spots has spread via social media.
“There's been a huge increase in the number of people going out looking for food,” Ms. Aloya said. “Everyone wanted to go to places that were easy to get to, but those places ran out. Then they went to the next place and the next place.”
Ms. Aloia oversees a Facebook Group Dedicated to foraging. He said newcomers don't always understand the unwritten etiquette of foraging, and many take to social media to report “honey holes” — places rich in mushrooms. Or, he said, they invade places that are on public land, even though others have long considered them sacred, secret places.
“There's been a huge surge in claims,” he said.
He said, “Knowledge that was esoteric and took years to learn has been eliminated by social media.” Langdon Cookewho teaches foraging in the Seattle area and wrote “The Mushroom Hunters”, a book about The underground subculture of commercial foragers. “You can even get coordinates as a first-time mushroom picker, finding species of mushrooms that might have taken amateurs years to figure out in the past.”
The unruly crowds have prompted action by those trying to rein in mushroom gatherers. Because of the growing numbers, Salt Point, the only state park in California that allows mushroom gathering, recently reduced its collection limit from five pounds to two pounds per person. Minnesota is also considering new restrictions on gathering mushrooms for personal use in state parks.
Climate change is also taking a toll Some aspects of mushroom growth. “The number and abundance of species have decreased significantly,” Dr. Desjardins said. “And it's been dry and the season is coming later.”
It's that time of year when morels and other ingredients make their way to the dinner table.
“A lot of menus have morels because the season has just started,” said chef Chris DiMaio of Whitefish, Montana. “We went out a few days ago and bought a few pounds of morels, and I'll be adding them to the menu this weekend.”
Foraging has long been popular in urban areas as well. “Wildman” Steve Brill The practice has been taught in Central Park for decades, and a group in Los Angeles called Hollywood Orchard He collects fruits that grow in abundance and often go to waste, and preserves them in pop-up kitchens to donate to local charities.
Indigenous and Native American tribes have long embraced food foraging as a way to have a healthy diet and as part of the food sovereignty movement to restore traditional foods. studies There is evidence to suggest that eating wild foods may provide essential nutrients.
“With food sovereignty, we're seeing the potential to bring healthy foods and ancestral foods back to the table that we've used for thousands of years to survive,” said Jill Falcon Ramker, assistant professor of community nutrition and sustainable food systems at Montana State University.
Sean Sherman, better known as the Sioux ChefAnd the founder of the indigenous restaurant Owamani in Minneapolis is among those adapting the cuisine to modern tastes.
“We’re not cooking like it’s 1491,” Mr. Sherman said. in an interview on NPR's “Fresh Air,” referring to the period before European colonization. Two typical dishes that rely on foraging 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 fungi these days,” said Mr. Cook, an author and Seattle forager., “They’re sexy and trendy and ideal for foraging.”
Fungi play important roles in natural systems, and they have a symbiotic relationship with the forest. Some fungi are the products of vast webs of mycelium that bind to tree roots and collect water and nutrients and deliver it to the tree in exchange for sugar. The mushrooms come to the surface where they release spores that are carried by the wind, which is part of mycelium reproduction. Other fungi break down dead plant material and send jolts of phosphorus and nitrogen to the roots of growing trees.
Picking mushrooms does not harm the forest or future mushroom harvests, as long as the underground mycelium is not disturbed. “The only thing that would be adverse is that you are also eliminating a food source for a lot of insects and other small animals and deer that eat them,” Dr. Desjardin said.
Pasture-raised crops can be expensive. At Far West Fungi, a popular mushroom store in San Francisco, wild chanterelles were selling for $32 a pound on a recent sale, while porcini went for $56 a pound and morels for $36 a pound.
Another valuable and unusually tasty mushroom is matsutakeOr pine mushrooms. They have a distinctive aroma — many compare their smell to a mix of dirty socks and Red Hots candy. Others say the scent is reminiscent of cinnamon, with subtle floral and citrus notes. They grow in pine forests around the West and can be collected on public lands under pine trees among pine needles and forest duff from early September to early November. National Forest land near Chemult, Ore., is one of the prime locations for pickers who come from across the country to harvest them during the two-month season.
There is a mushroom trail in the west followed seasonally by itinerant mushroom pickers, about which Mr Cook has written.
“If you drew a circle around the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia and the Yukon, you could pick mushrooms anywhere inside that circle every day of the year,” Mr. Cook said.