Overnight SAR Mushroom Foray 2025

This year 14 brave souls from SAR and their family and friends joined us on an overnight mushroom foray.

We met on Oct 4th on Stampede pass early in the morning.

While Shay was taking release forms and entertaining guests with his amazing social skills, myself and Mel have taken equipment to the campsite, to make our hike up there easier. After some entertaining 4x4 experience, we parked my truck with all the equipment and made our way down to the rest of the group.

I explained a little about our cascade ridge habitat and how it differs from our other forays where we were finding chanterelles, and how this habitat is more suitable for Boletacae - which is a family of mushrooms that all have pores under their caps and include such genera as Boletus, Aeroboletus, Leccinum, Suillus etc...

The group eagerly spread through the beargrass, with Michael leading the search party

The first mushroom we found was the very abundant little orange mushroom - the Flame Bonnet or by it's scientific name - Mycena Strobillenoidea

Next came the Fir-Cone Mushroom (Strobilliurus trulisatus)

The blueberry fields greeted us with beautiful autumn hues, and we were a bit delayed picking the few remaining blueberries

We have stopped to discuss our find of Russula species.

I have described how Russula are a gilled mushroom, with white brittle gills, (hence their folk name - Brittlegill mushroom) with various cap colors. The only reliable way to determine edibility is by taste and spit method - Russula that contain toxic compounds will taste spicy like chili.

Later everyone developed the most reliable way of identifying Russula by verifying their brittle nature with the aid of some sturdy nearby firs

We also discussed how mycelium is the actual organism, whereas what we call "Mushroom" is only the fruiting body used for sexual reproduction by the fungus. This means we can safely extract the entire fruiting body without worrying of damaging the actual organism.

Our next interesting find was a Suillus - one of the family of Jacks, which include slippery jacks, fat jacks etc..

Suillus are all mushrooms that are in the Bolletacae family, which means they have pores under their cap. Their pores are yellow, often quite wide and the stipe usually has characteristic "dots" that make Suillus easy to ID. The cap is slimy.

They are an edible mushroom, but not considered choice, and i mostly prefer pickling them.

Our next find was Aeroboletus Mirabillis a beautiful choice mushroom that is saprotrophic - which means it decomposes wood, and this particular mushroom likes to decompose Tsuga trees

We also encountered a lot of "Wooly Spikes" - or Chroogomphus tomentosus species

These are often confused with chanterelles, but we learned how their homogenous color, the hue, the non white flesh and the gills vs veins easily distinguish them from real chanterelles.

We also saw some Hygrophoropsis aurantica, which is another mushroom frequently confused with chanterelles. It also has real gills and rather colorful stipe that can help distinguish it from chanterelles.

Our next lucky find was a beautiful Leccinum button. The exact species are difficult to identify, as the leccinum genus is quite a mess as far as species go. For those of you interested in the subject, here is a good reading on this: https://boletes.wpamushroomclub.org/the-red-and-orange-capped-leccinums/

Our next find was Xerocomellus atropurpureus, another fine edible Boletacae, commonly known as Zellers bolete.

Boletus smithii, or Smith's bolete

And of course, the main course - the King! Porcini weren't abundant, but we were lucky enough to find at least a couple

This image beautifully demonstrates the reticulation - white netting that we expect to find on Boletus edulis - the king bolete

Note the reticulation or white netting on the second image. This is what we expect to find on Boletus edulis, and in fact, every true bolete has some sort of reticulation, though not all reticulations are white.

During the foray, I was mistaken and presented a mushroom i thought was Death cap - Amanita phalloides. In reality, this was another Amanita - Amanita augusta, that lost it's warts due to age and rainfall.

To compensate for that, i went and found some real Amanita phalloides, and am including it here for all of you to behold. It's a beautiful mushroom.

Even though i was wrong on the identification of the Amanita, what i said during the taste and spit still holds, so i am including this demonstration here:

Another large group of mushrooms we met were Cortinarius genus.

We learned that Cortinarius mushrooms are very diverse, coming in multiple colors and shapes, but all share some similar characteristics - they have a webbing (cortina - curtain in Latin) under their caps, that later breaks and leaves remnants on the stipe. That remnant usually gets rusty color, since all cortinarius have rusty spores, and as these drop, they color the cortina in rusty color. Most cortinarius are toxic, though there are some edible species.

One of the Cortinarius mushrooms had us confused for a little bit, as we thought it may even be honey mushroom - Armillaria or Desarmillaria species. However, after we spore printed our specimen, we confirmed rusty spores and excluded honey mushrooms, that would have spore printed white.

Another fun mushroom we encountered is called Pseudohydnum gelatinosum - or Cat Tongue

They are an edible jelly mushroom, and i often make candy with them as they are neutral in their taste and would absorb sugar and any other taste additives when they caramelize.

We found a lot of older Chicken of the woods - Laetiporus conifericola, though most of it was quite old. I mentioned that i usually pick only the freshest edges of the mushroom, before they become fibrous inside

Of course, we can not forget the always beautiful Amanita muscaria - the fly agaric

I explained how this mushroom is at the same time toxic, deliriant and edible, depending on the preparation.

We found a Bird's nest mushroom -

Take a look and note the little "eggs" in the right side of the image. These are the organs in which this mushroom stores its spores.

We found some coral mushrooms from the genus Ramaria. I do not know which species this is, as Ramaria species are quite hard to ID

Another great find was the Bear head mushroom - Hericium americanum

We also learned to differentiate Hericium americanum and Ramaria

After a long day of hiking, we finally arrived at the camp. One of the feedbacks i received was that i failed to communicate both the hike distance and the precise location of the camp site ahead of time - lesson learned and i will do better next time!

We set camp and got to cooking the mushrooms we picked and the dried mushrooms that I have brought with us. On the menu was a traditional eastern european barley and mushroom soup.

We set some of the mushrooms we wanted to spore print on our glass plates.

With food in our belly and camp set, we set out to observe the night through UV light

We didn't find as many luminescent and fluorescent species as i was hoping for, but those we did find were quite fascinating

The morning greeted us with light frost and beautiful sunny weather

We reviewed the results of our spore printing and learned how valuable this tool is in mushroom identification

We did additional foraging and found a few more interesting species, including

a Hydnellum peckii - bleeding tooth mushroom

And an artist's conch (Ganoderma applanatum)

We concluded our foray with a short talk about mushroom preservation - dehydration, freeze drying, parboiling and freezing as well as dry sautéing and freezing are all good methods to preserve your finds for culinary use throughout the year

I hope you all enjoyed our little adventure, and looking forward to seeing you in our future forays.