Hike: Mushrooms!
During my backpack this past weekend, I couldn't help noticing the plethora of mushrooms and fungi in the forest. I know it sounds crazy or bizarre, but I love the stuff. Ever since I was a kid, I was always rooting around in the forest for some fungus or lichen I read about in a book, hoping I'd find one. I've only been hunting for morels in Ohio once, and it was so much fun. There seems to be something mythic about mushrooms. What is it? One reads a chapter devoted to them in Lord of the Rings; Lewis Carol makes frequent references to them in Alice in Wonderland and gives them a role in the plot; they appear frequently in nursery rhymes; they are woven through the fabric of fairy tales, mythologies, and religions. They are hallucinogenic, delicious, sacred, deadly.
As I walked through the forest saturday, I saw a squirrel race up a tree and glare down at me, twitching its tail, the entire cap of a mushroom--about a third the length of its body--in its mouth. After the deluge of rain saturday night, my walk back through the same forest trail the next morning revealed new, pithy buttons that had since broken through the forest floor. I imagined the earth of an otherwise silent forest bulging and popping all night long.
I made some (ok, a lot of) photos of different mushrooms and toadstools along the trail and thought I'd share some of the more interesting ones.
4 comments:
Wowee! That is a lot of mushrooms. And they all look so different. I've been taught how to distinguish some of the more common ones, but I'm not good at remembering. I'm not brave enough to trust myself to pick and eat. I'd surely be dead.
Have you ever been to the mushroom festival in Creede? I heard on the radio it is coming up. That sounds like fun to me!!
Creede? I didn't know they had one. I know that Telluride has a huge one, which I have been to. But Creede?
You people know far too much about mushrooms.
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