April 2014 Feast Magazine

Morel Madness is a three-day affair with forays taking place on the second day. The first day is largely social and educational. I arrive around dinnertime on Friday and, after some presentations on morels and other fungi, I venture out from the main building toward the campfire area where I listen to stories from veteran foragers. With full bellies, they relay tales of past great finds while their breath crystallizes in the crisp air. The stories are perfect – the right amount of fact and fiction. Each story outdoes the previous in terms of the amount of morels found and the cleverness needed to find them.

I wake the next morning smelling like campfire and hungry to create stories of my own. I walk from my cabin to the main building and after inhaling a homemade breakfast, I am introduced to Vern Creely. We set out for a trail on the north end of the park.

The woods are quiet. A recent rainfall has the air heavy with an earthy scent that is welcome after a long winter. As we tromp through the forest, Creely says that most of the morel organism is an underground mycelium – some of them stretch for miles – and the part we are hunting is its fruiting body. Kind of like an apple on a tree.

At this point, my mushroom hunting tenure consists of only a few hours, but already I can begin to understand the mania that I heard longtime foragers describe yesterday. I notice that the woods that were once a homogenous backdrop take on a new life.

The morel is usually a saprotroph – it is in a symbiotic relationship with the roots of certain trees – ash, sycamore and elm. The fruiting bodies, the honeycomb-like brown mushrooms, are temperamental and require moist, warm conditions to emerge. The soil has to be between 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. As such, they are ephemeral.

They tend to be here today and gone by tomorrow.

“When it comes to hunting morels, you are not looking down, you are looking up,” says Charlie Raiser who has been hunting mushrooms since our country’s bicentennial celebration. “Mysteriously, if the elm tree is diseased, then it prompts the mycelia to produce more fruiting bodies. The ‘50s and ‘60s were the golden age of morel hunting because of Dutch elm disease – it swept through North America and killed millions of elm trees.”

I pace around a bunch of what I think are elm trees – the bark is gray with ridges and brown streaks. I pause and tilt my head. I swear there are conical contours in the soil that I hadn’t seen before. I squat down, and with a surgeon-like