Icicle River pt 2

The most expensive mushrooms in the world are truffles, but the matsutake (Tricholoma magnivelare) comes in second. They are prized in Japan, in part because they have a pretty long shelf life if found before their veils open (these guys would be considered past their prime but still quite saleable). Mushrooms like these might sell for $100-$200 a pound in Japan. In markets in the US they will sell for $20-$50 per pound. At Icicle, they're free, provided you get a permit from the forest service and that you can find them. Notice the thick, felty veil that flares up towards the gills, and the red-brown scurfy coating on the stalk.

Like the white chanterelles, matsutake like to grow mostly underground, and erupt only at the last minute to release their spores. By then the bugs have usually found them, so it is best to try to find them while they're still buried. More than one mushroom hunter, myself included, believes they can find them by smell. Their odor is a strange, spicy, moist smell that has been described as a combination of red hots and old socks but to my nose smells like old leaves and cinnamon bark – the real spice from India, nothing sugary about it. Whatever it evokes in you, once you have smelled it, you won't forget it. These photos were of the only two matsutake I found that year, on 10-13-03.

Many people will dig up anything white that dares to poke its head out of a shrump, and callously chuck if it is an innocent Russula or Clitocybe that had the misfortune to imitate a matsutake. It is easy to tell a true matsutake from the look-alikes without digging it up, though. Simply slip a finger under the cap and feel for the veil. The veil of a matsutake is felty and slightly sticky. If you feel that, dig it up and have a closer look.

The fall of '04, though, was a different matter. Unfortunately the rain had fogged up my lens, so all my pictures of these guys game out a little out of focus... but there were scads, hordes, and unreasonable gobs of matsutake about. There were so many that there were many areas that I literally had to walk on tip-toe to keep from stepping on them. This picture is not atypical, except that they are all mature enough to see easily in one shot.

Having found such a bounty, I had to figure out what to do with them. They have a surprisingly mild flavor given their overpowering odor, and a strange rubbery texture that turns to the texture of old tires if sauteed like you would a chanterelle or a bolete. After considerable research, I settled on the idea of slicing them paper thin and making them into matsutake miso soup – boiling them for just 30 seconds or so before turning off the heat, and then letting them sit until the soup was cool enough to heat. Prepared this way, I can begin to understand why Japan values them so.

This photo was taken on 10-20-04.

Icicle is home to another popular edible, Morchella elata, the black morel. It is hard to get a sense of scale in this photo, but the biggest of these five (yes, five, look carefully) is about as long as my hand (7 inches). I found them when I decided to stop at just one more spot after a particularly rainy and unrewarding day of spring mushroom hunting. I decided to stop to take a photo of some pretty but inedible mushroom, and, as I crouched low to line up the shot, spotted these guys hiding under some bushes. They are about as big as morels get, and in perfect condition. This photo was taken on 5-15-05.

More morels from Eastern Washington

This is really just a my camera is cool shot. This is the view of the gills of Neolentinus lepideus through a magnifying glass. Note that the gill edges are rugged, like saw teeth. This is one of the few mushrooms that has that feature. Cool, huh? This photo was taken at a mushroom foray on 10-13-03.

This mushroom, like the violet Cortinarius from the other side of the mountains, is listed in Arora as rare but is common in the areas where it grows – its just that the areas where it grows are not that common. This is Phaeolepiota auranticum, and these are just young buttons growing on the edge of a stream. This photo was taken on 9-28-05.

The oddest thing about this species is its veil. It looks like a fairly ordinary skirtlike veil from the top side, but flipped over you can see the fuzzy, granular appearance of the underside. This granularity continues down the stalk. This photo is from 10-20-04, the same location as the photo above.

I believe these guys are Russula xerampelina, the shrimp Russula, but they, also, did not smell particularly shrimpy. They match in all other characteristics, though. This photo was taken on 9-29-04.

A different Russula at Denny Creek

This is a particularly energetic slime mold, racing across the fallen branch and up this little shrub. In this stage, the slime mold is actually a single, large cell with multiple nuclei. It moves by sending out pseudopods, just like an amoeba. It will crawl towards food and away from noxious stimuli at the stunning rate of a few millimeters an hour! Not bad for a fungus... or whatever it is.

Slime mold in its spore-forming state at Deception Creek

A close up of the slime mold's race up the shrub. This slime mold is probably Physarum polycephalum, but I only say that because that's a common species of yellow slime mold. A quick web search reveals the following update on the taxonomy of slime molds:

Physarum polycephalum is a member of the class/superclass Myxogastridae (or myxomycetes) commonly referred to as plasmodial or true slime molds. Although historically classified as fungi, molecular data now clearly show that they are most closely related to the cellular slime molds (Dictyostelidae). Together they form the supergroup Amoebozoa, which also includes amoebae with lobose (broad) pseudopodia (e.g. Acanthamoeba), archamoebae (e.g. Entamoeba), and pelobionts (flagellated amoebae without mitochondria).

These photos were taken on 5-15-05.

I believe this little guy (note the size of the fir needles in the background) is a teeny, tiny Lepiota or parasol mushroom. I was unable to key the species. This photo was taken on 10-20-04.

This shows the tops of a cluster of Suillus lakei, the Western Painted Suillus, yet another unusually fuzzy mushroom. It is hard to appreciate the colors in this shot, but the pores are golden yellow, the stalks are streaked with yellow and brick red. The ring is red with yellowish wool, like the cap. This photo was taken on 10-13-03. See notes on edibility of Suillus below

I don't have any idea what species this mushroom is, or even what genus it belongs in. It had gills, and the white margin is striking. It was growing amid many hundreds of matsutake on 9-29-04, and who knows when we'll see it fruit in Icicle again.

This is a shot of a small section of forest floor, just to give an idea of how prolific Icicle really was around 9-29-04. This section was unremarkable except that the ground cover of the plant variety was sparse enough to get a good picture. Notice at least three different species of mushroom growing in this shot (the Suillus cavipes as noted above, the yellow mushroom in the foreground (probably another Suillus species), and the pale purple mushrooms scattered in the middle (probably a Cortinarius, but who knows?)

Seeing this bounty of mushrooms may be making you wonder – are these edible? The answer is yes, they are, at least as far as the Suillus are concerned. As far as anyone knows, no species of Suillus is poisonous. However, according to Arora, in a tasting test in Santa Cruz, the Suillus consistantly ranked last. On a scale of one to ten, several people gave it a zero, and one even gave it a negative five! Arora also notes that Suillus caerulescens, the Douglas Fir Suillus, is the best of the lot. He suggests making use of their inherently slimy texture by using them as an escargot substitute, but I have always found more prized edibles any time I have found Suillus, and thus have never actually eaten any.