Mushroom Hunt

Over the weekend we went to the Carmel Valley to celebrate a friend's 65th birthday and to hunt for mushrooms. This year has had a good mix of conditions - with consistent rains followed by sun - so the crop was in abundance. We had two guys with us (one a ranger and one a PhD in Chemistry) who know mushrooms. And there seem to be three arts here. First, is the art of finding them. The top picture is of mushrooms in the wild. Differentiating between mushrooms, earth and leaves on the ground is pretty tough. The identification of some types, like the second one pictured, is complex. On the ground this one looked a lot like animal scat.

The second challenge is to avoid the poison oak all around. I have a monster aversion to poison oak based on a lot of experience and even with the new treatments I try to avoid contact.

The third challenge is not getting the poison ones. The third picture is of a bunch of the wrong kind of mushrooms we found. There are evidently two types of poisonous mushrooms - ones that make you sick - and those seem to act pretty quickly and ones that can kill you and the effects of those may 24 hours to be recognized and by then the damage has been done.