Walk About Martinez -- "A Short Cut to Mushrooms"

“Shroomer would you take a few of us on a mushroom hike?”  That’s my trail name and I’ve been fascinated by and studied mushrooms, for well over forty years.  So when I got the call from fellow Pacific Crest Trail thru hiker, Nancy, AKA Why Not, I quickly agreed with one caveat.  I wanted to hunt in the Sierra Foothills, the forests near her home, so that she’d learn what to look for in her area.  Jim, another long distance hiker who lives near Folsom, signed on and chose the venue, a portion of the Western States Trail accessed from “Third Gate” 20 minutes out of Auburn.  

The Western States Trail begins in Salt Lake City and runs all the way to Sacramento.  It traverses the Sierra through Squaw Valley and follows a traditional Native American route.  It was later used by miners as the most direct trail from the gold mines of California to the silver mines of Nevada.  Most of it remains in a natural state and is one of the last intact trail crossings of the Sierra Nevada.

I met Why Not and Jim this past week in Auburn.  We drove out to the trailhead and walked into a forest of pine and Douglas fir, madrone, oaks and bay, the quintessential foothill forest.  We were on the steep south side of the American River Canyon; the river flowed far below us.  Initially the forest was all autumn leaves and moss, relatively dry for this time of year after last weeks desiccating wind storm, and as there were few mushrooms here, I began to learn more about my companions. 

Jim and I had hiked into and I remembered him as being a person of depth.  He’s a retired building inspector who has studied Eastern Religions and taken courses with Depak Chopra among others, and can add a new dimension to a conversation. 

Why Not is a retired dentist who, in her mid fifties, decided that making money wasn’t worth nearly as much as having the freedom and time to really live her life.  She sold her practice and has been traveling and hiking ever since.  When a friend asked her to go on a PCT thru hike in 2009, she had answered, “Why not.”  She got her trail name and her eager friend became known as, Why Wait.  She explained that when named by others on trail, middle aged women always seemed to get names that included “gramma” or “granny.”  Neither of them wanted anything to do with that and took names before hitting trail. 

Jim and Why Not had spent years running ultra marathons.  Jim had run the Western States 100, Squaw Valley to Auburn several times and knew the trail well.  This was his training ground as Mt. Diablo is mine.  Why Not had also run a number of ultras, and I just listened to them connect on a subject I knew very little about.  Names and races, all famous, all extreme, up and down the Sierra.  What does it take to keep a human body in motion, running all day and into the next?  Training, tremendous stamina, but it seemed most of all the mental acuity to simply keep going beyond the pain of exertion and exhaustion no matter what. 

Jim told one story of coming into an aid station completely dead, his only thought, to have the aid workers call in an airlift.  But a friend had met him there and instead of accepting his utter defeat, had challenged him, had insulted him and made him really mad.  Jim threatened to slug his buddy who had smiled back and yelled, “That’s the stuff!” and then ushered him out of the aid station and back on trail, and amazingly, he had been able to continue. 

Why Not told similar stories and I realized that all of us long trail hikers were made of the same mettle, just over greater distances and at a slower pace than these ultras.  In hiking, it’s not the gear, or the training, it’s whether you can put one foot in front of the other, day after day for a long, long time.  Can you do it, and do you enjoy it.  You need both, and clearly these two had honed their steel at the pace of an ultra.   

We hiked deeper into the clefts of the canyon and past China Wall, a massive rock structure several miles in, possibly built by Chinese laborers in the nineteenth century.  Was it the footing for a bridge over the nearby ravine?  We speculated but didn’t know.  Jim pointed out great overgrown gashes in the hillside, scars left by the hydraulic canons used in the placer mining of the same time.  The trail we were on was a remnant of the emigrants westward movement, and showed the impact on the landscape of the Forty Niners. 

The Potato Patch, the spud shaped sand bar which stretches north and south for miles in the ocean outside of the Golden Gate, was created by the hydraulic placer mining of the 1850s.  So were huge sand bars in the Bay, as trillions of tons of Sierra Foothill mud and silt were washed down the rivers. 

Here we were walking in the remnant hills of that great mountain destroying time.  A hundred and fifty years later and the damage was still evident in places where the soil seemed nothing but gravel and rock.  The topsoil has not come back, and it will be a thousand years before it does.  Autumn leaves, deadfall and decaying wood and fungus, were doing their best to fill in the spaces between the rocks with new organic material, compost for the next generation of life on that once desolated hill.  Nature will outlive us yet.   

Jim kept up a constant patter of stories and information, and finally looked at me and said, “This is what you do in the hills behind the Muir House.”  He’d been to Martinez for one of my hiker BBQ’s and Muir House tours.  Neither of us can keep our mouths shut when it comes to our favorite lands and trails.  They’re like old friends and we want to share the stories we carry with us of how they were ruined and saved, of who lived up there, and why an old orchard grows where there should only be oaks.  Jim had been running and training on these trails and old roads for most of his adult life and he loved them.  He was a real guide. 

As we dropped in elevation and the forest grew moist we began to see our first mushrooms.  Poking out from under the leaves on trail were several different species of suillus, a usually slimy fungus related to the most wonderful of all edible mushrooms, the porcini, boletus edulus.  The resemblance is slight, as porcini are exquisitely delectable, and suillus, in the words of the great David Aurora, author of the best mushroom books available, “better kicked than picked, better stomped than chomped.” 

Then we found our first russulas, the very beautiful and edible, shrimp russula, a brilliant purple against the moss and leaves of the forest floor.  Then it’s close cousin, russula brevipes, the short stemmed russula, began to nudge its huge bulk above the duff.  This mushroom is also edible but so is cardboard.  So who wants to eat something like that?  Another fungus, that’s who, hypomyces lactiflourum, which parasitizes poor nondescript brevipes and turns it into the lobster mushroom, a brilliant red mass of deliciousness that I’ve seen go for enormous prices at Berkeley Bowl when they’re available. 

Now things were getting exciting and although the three of us were all nearing 60, we scampered down that forest trail looking for more like a bunch of kids.  This was all purely scientific you understand, as we weren’t in an area for legal gathering, but Why Not really wanted to learn how to hunt chanterelles, the elegant winter inhabitant of our oak woodlands. 

Chanterelles are a mushroom so prolific in poundage, that I used to earn my ski lift tickets selling them to Chez Panisse, Crogans and Spiedinis restaurants many years ago.  Its delicate, sophisticated, earthy flavor has made it Katie’s favorite mushroom at our winter dinners.  I don’t think my daughter Sarah has ever had anything but chanterelle stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey.  

At a sharp turn in the trail, under a massive live oak and a thin tangle of blackberries, I saw what we were looking for, a gleam of gold almost completely covered in trailside duff.  Here the mycelial mushroom plant, a vast web of living fibers in the soil, had put together all its nutrient rich energy and formed fruit, a young mushroom, actually four or five of them right next to each other.  As the mycelium is pumped into the little mushroom, it pushes against the forest leaves and breaks through, just like a spring shoot.  The forming mushroom often creates a telltale bump in the duff, and lucky us, it had broken through just enough so that we could see the bright gold of the chanterelle against the dark of decaying leaves.  Once this one chanterelle was spotted, everyone stopped in their tracks as chances are we were stomping others still concealed under the leaves. 

The great oak we were standing under was a “mother tree.”  Chanterelles are a mycorrhizal mushroom, the opposite of a parasite.  The chanterelle mycelia produces nutrients for the mother oak and the oak gives the mushroom sugars in return.  It’s symbiosis at its best.  We looked at the ancient oak and guessed it to be two hundred and fifty years old, but given the placer mining in the area, maybe it was only one hundred and fifty.  That mushroom may have been the same age, helping the oak recolonize a hillside that probably looked like a moonscape when the miners got through with it. 

The hunt was on to comb through the area learning how to look for bumps and when finding one, the excitement of reaching in and pulling out something as beautiful as a chanterelle.  Picking these mushrooms is just what the mycelium is hoping for.  Now our hands and clothes were covered in spores and for the rest of the hike we inadvertently let them drift off of us through the forest.  Maybe just where a young oak was yet to be beneficially colonized.

In the same area we found a line of blewits, a purple, fairy ring mushroom.  Once a small ring of mushrooms, the circle had grown larger as the mycelium used up the nutrients in the center, forcing it to grow out.  Eventually the fairy ring had grown so large that the line of mushrooms we found had only the slightest of curves to it.  It was almost straight, the circumference was now so big.  Some can become huge, as in France where a fairy ring is over two thousand feet in diameter and over seven hundred years old.

Now I had some converts.  These guys had mushroom fever.  It’s just as fun, whether you’re going to eat them or simply identify them.  Hunting for mushrooms is magical.  At one point as Jim was crawling around on his hands and knees through the undergrowth, he realized that in all the years of hiking and running this trail, he had never studied the forest so closely.  We found a woodrat’s nest, and little piles of broken acorns all neatly piled up indicating that we had stumbled on the dinning room for some small animal.     

Further up trail we came upon armillaria mellea, the honey mushroom, a close relative of shiitake, but a killer.  Unlike the chanterelle, this is a dangerous parasite sending rhizomes from tree to tree, inexorably killing the trees in a forest.  Scientists speculate that a honey mushroom in Oregon may be the largest living organism on the planet and it is killing whole forests. 

We even found a few candy caps, one of the only mushrooms that can be used in deserts.  It smells of maple, vanilla and cinnamon and is a great addition to cakes and cookies. 

On our way back we passed a spot where Jim had been night running years before when he had been stopped by a deep growl coming from the side of the trail.  It raised his hackles and he talked loudly, trying to scare what he believed was a mountain lion very close to the trail.  It was the following year, 1994, that Barbara Schoener was killed by a mountain lion while out jogging, 100 feet up trail from his earlier encounter.  She was the wife of the friend who had made him so angry during his collapse in the Western States 100, several years before.  We heard the whole story from Jim with the personal connection of someone who knew her.   He had been part of the search when she didn’t come home, and felt the loss experienced by her family.   We spent a bit of time at the nearby monument that had been erected at a beautiful overlook. 

We hiked back to our cars having had a wonderful workout in a stunningly beautiful forest, a dose of the Gold Rush History of the place and a deepening of our friendships.  We heard the story of tragic personal loss of life on trail, and we had found mushrooms, lots of them.  I’m sure Jim, and Why Not, will never hike a familiar trail as they have before.  Once you’ve looked for and found a chanterelle, no golden leaf of autumn looks quite the same, and suddenly every bump in the forest floor has the potential for magic.

Now a big warning and a suggestion to all of my readers.  If you are interested in learning how to pick mushrooms, don’t do it from books, or pictures on line, and don’t try it from the pictures accompanying this article.  It’s simply too dangerous.  It’s not just what they look like, it’s how they smell and feel, how flimsy or firm, how the stem snaps like a stick of chalk or is fibrous, and sometimes even how they taste and many other factors, that go into identifying mushrooms. 

When I became interested in mushrooming many years ago, I found people who knew mushrooms and hiked with them, and most importantly, I joined the San Francisco Mycological Society http://www.mssf.org/  and took part in their forays and fungus fairs.  The cost was nearly nothing, but I gained a lifetime of mushrooming joy and safety by learning from the masters. 

There are a number of events coming up in January,  including the beginners foray into the SF Watershed, one of my favorites, as the area is not usually open to the public, and produces over 150 species.  It’s a fabulous hike and worth joining the society just for this one foray.  Later in the month are weekend camps at Point Reyes and elsewhere.  There are mycological societies all across America.  Some of those nearby include, Sonoma, Santa Cruz, and the East Bay Mycological Societies.  Check out MykoWeb  for other locations. 


“By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs - now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life....”  John Muir