Mt. Hood: We came, we saw, we ...

Our eagerly anticipated whirlwind trip to the Mount Hood area on October 2, 2010 was, um, interesting, but not quite as productive as we had hoped. 

Saturday dawned gray and there was just a hint of intermittent drizzle, but it burned off and was clear and beautiful by noon.  We headed out for one of our very favorite spots, over the ridge and into what we call the transition zone between firs and pines, at between 3,000 and 4,000 ft elevation.  The Tamaracks were just starting to turn, but the Viney Maples were on their way to fall colors, and we spotted our first White Chanterelles from the car as we drove in on a back road.  Obviously, a very good sign!

 

But there had hardly been any rain for almost two weeks, and the ground felt drier than we expected.  And the spot we’d headed for, a place we call “the magic tree,” was almost devoid of any kind of mushrooms; we only found two whites, and they were small and quite dry.  In good years, hitting it at the peak, we would expect to easily fill our baskets here and still leave plenty of them to repopulate for the future.

With expectations diminished considerably, we headed to another area nearby where we’ve been gathering mushrooms for over 20 years, a long, uphill climb through mixed woods that usually contain a plentiful variety.  But not this day.  We found a few White Chanterelles, a Zeller’s Bolete, and two small clumps of Hericium Abietis growing on a large fallen tree that had been out for a while and were very dry.  But that was about it.  No Matsutakes, no more Boletes (except for a couple of small patches of Suillus), and assuredly no Cauliflowers.

We did, however, find a most unusual mushroom - or, more accurately - a clustered group of them.  And there was another clump of them nearby.  Our initial thought was that it was some kind of polypore, then we second guessed ourselves, unsure, since it wasn’t hard like polypores often are and since it was growing out of the ground rather than on wood.  When we got home, we found in David Arora’s classic book, Mushrooms Demystified, something called a Blue-Capped Polypore (Albatrellus flettii), that we think is it (photo at end of post).  We’re taking a spore print now for added confirmation.

Moving west again into what we think of as wetter territory, we went to another spot that almost always produces a nice fruiting of Coral Hydnum, but not today.  Few, if any, Chanterelles were out, either.

“We may just be too early,” we mused as we headed back to our cabin.  That could be... everything else this year has been late.  Yet, the good fruiting we found on our own property on the southern Oregon coast the previous weekend had made us think otherwise.   And it’s certainly possible that we might have hit pay dirt if we had kept looking and visited all our “spots.”  We didn’t have time to do that, and it didn’t really feel like it would have been productive if we had.

We’ll head back in a couple of weeks to explore some more.  Meanwhile, rain is needed, and probably cooler temperatures, to get things going in the Mount Hood area.