Story by Chloe Loveall and Devin Gosberry
Photos by Tiffany Han
On an early summer morning, the Siltcoos Lake Trail nestled inside western Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest is quiet, and the air is crisp. While visitors often come to Siuslaw to make the arduous trek up Mary’s Peak, the highest peak on the Oregon Coast range, others come in search of smaller wonders. As the sun starts to filter in through the layers of leaves and branches of the forest’s canopy, it highlights the variety of mushrooms that grow every year at this time.
From the coastal mountain range to the Blue Mountains in Eastern Oregon, wild mushrooms are bountiful in the Pacific Northwest. The mild climate, plentiful rain, and extensive forestlands make the region one of the most productive areas in the world, famed for growing edible wild mushrooms such as Wild Chanterelle, Lobster, Matsutake, and Morel in delicious abundance. Some other species, like Oregon White and Black Truffles, occur nowhere else on the planet.
Owen Rice, founder of MycoLogical Natural Products in Eugene, has been using his company as a vehicle to bring awareness to Oregon’s wild foraged mushrooms since 1995. Rice grew up in Michigan, where he picked Morel mushrooms each spring with his family. After moving to Eugene in 1989, his hobby sprouted into a passion. At the time, he was a student at the University of Oregon, but he spent his free time foraging for mushrooms and researching sustainable land management practices. “During that time, I started to read about programs in the Amazon forest where people were attempting to utilize the sustainable harvest of understory products to create incentive for forest conservation,” says Rice. “At the same time, I was thinking about what was going on [in Oregon]. No one was talking about the value of the mushroom harvest, or asking why we weren’t managing the forests for mushrooms and other understory products.” After completing his degree, Rice decided to focus his attention on fungi full-time. “I just fell in love with mushrooms.”
The United Sates has a long history of producing Portobello and Button mushrooms, but the wild foraged mushrooms that Rice’s company sell aren’t a common part of most Americans’ diets. However, that is changing. “For generations,” Rice explains, “Americans considered any other kind of mushroom to be a toadstool and they were afraid of it, but in the last fifteen years that’s changed so much. There’s a lot of interest in all different species of mushrooms and more farms are producing all kinds of exotic varieties.” Farmers can grow Portobello and Button mushrooms on compost, and others, such as Shiitake and Oyster, grow on wood waste.
But even farmers have difficulty coaxing these wild species to flourish, because as foragers know, mushrooms are extremely sensitive to weather and need ideal conditions to grow. They need the perfect amount of rain and shade, and erratic deviations in the weather make it difficult to successfully cultivate them. Mark, who would like to keep his name confidential due to the competitive nature of his work, is a forager and mushroom enthusiast who has dedicated the past 15 years of his life to the practice. He says that “Mother Nature is in control” when it comes to harvesting mushrooms. Growers often rely on the processes of nature to produce quality mushrooms, which means they are sometimes unable to recreate certain conditions on their farms. One of these processes is the mushrooms’ symbiotic relationship with the root system of trees, or mycorrhizas, where the fungus absorbs specific nutrients from the tree roots to produce a particular kind of harvest.
Wild mushrooms are hot commodities in Oregon for several reasons. The increasing popularity of the farm-to-table movement make fresh picked mushrooms a staple in restaurants throughout Oregon. Mycologists are attracted to the scientific intricacies of the diverse species of mushrooms, while spiritual seekers use hallucinogenic properties of some varieties of the fungi. With the demand for wild mushrooms being so high, foragers are often competing against less experienced mushroom hunters for the best harvest. Due to the lack of control over the growth process, foragers must be skilled in locating and picking the best mushrooms.
In the pursuit of wild mushrooms, foragers face many obstacles. According to Mark, one of the major issues of foraging is the U.S. Forest Service failing to enforce foraging laws. Foragers need a proper license to hunt for wild mushrooms, costing anywhere from about $25 per month for a basic license to $200 per month for a license to pick the Matsutake, a highly sought after species of fungi. Mark believes the general public can easily get away with taking an excessive amount of mushrooms with little to no consequence. In turn, foragers like Mark go to extreme measures to collect the best mushrooms. Personally, Mark has his own unique tactics for fending off inexperienced mushroom hunters. He covers his tracks to the mushroom plots by walking backwards on the sand dunes, and keeps an eye out for “tattletales”, a flower that indicates exactly where a mushroom will grow and what type it will be, and removes them. While some may find his methods bizarre, he takes pride in foraging correctly, abiding by the set laws because they are there for a reason: to preserve the wildlife and keep mushrooms growing.
Although the preservation of wild mushrooms is of the upmost importance to farmers and foragers, in the Pacific Northwest, forestlands are not managed with the goal of protecting mushrooms and other foraged harvests. Most products that grow on public lands are managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Rice believes that the primary mission of the Forest Service is serving the timber industry and managing the forest for timber harvest. “They turn a blind eye to the value of Chanterelles and other mushrooms that are being produced on the land, because their main objective is the timber harvest,” says Rice.
The timber industry clear-cuts and thins the forests of the Pacific Northwest, even though foraged harvests are a sustainable resource. “There have been numerous studies done by people at Oregon State University and amateur mycology groups regarding the intensive harvest of wild mushrooms. To date, all of the studies have shown that the harvest is very sustainable,” Rice explains. “There isn’t really a negative impact on the resource. The mushroom is a fruit of an organism that is living in the ground, so it’s like picking berries or fruit.”
The mushroom harvest already creates income for local people, but Rice believes that foraged products could generate enough revenue to displace the timber industry. “It’s sustainable, it happens every year, and it has a much less dramatic impact on the resources.”
Rice believes that people need to be educated about the impact that land management has on the production of mushrooms. “I think if the public realized that these wonderful things are dependent on proper management of the forest, people would demand that management practices change. If you clear-cut a forest, the mushrooms don’t come back for one hundred years. Even a lot of the thinning operations dramatically reduce the number of mushrooms.” In spite of their size, these small wonders are a resource that the Pacific Northwest could not afford to lose, and may be an instrument in creating more sustainable land management practices in the future.

Gallery • 3 Photos

An inedible species of mushroom remains undisturbed in the Siltcoos forest.