Mushrooms

It is the time of year here in Southeast Alaska when the most interesting mushrooms and other fungi put forth their obvious above ground manifestations.  There are mushrooms to be found throughout the year but the late summer and early fall are when the most interesting, tasty, and beautiful ones emerge from the earth.  I have become increasingly fascinated with mushrooms in the last few years having evolved from a hunter of the more common and well known edible ones, to a true mycophile intrigued with all aspects of them not just their edibility or psychoactive properties.  Did you know that mushrooms (when I say mushrooms this includes all fungi) are more closely related evolutionarily to animals than they are to plants?  Did you know that 30% of healthy soil is made up of the mycelia of fungi?  Did you know that numerous studies from highly respected universities are finding overwhelming evidence that certain mushrooms are undeniably beneficial in treating addiction, depression, PTSD, phobias, and even dementia?  Did you know that mushrooms can regrow and/or reroute neural pathways in the brain?
My growing obsession with learning more about mushrooms was triggered by three things, all of which are episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast to which I also have a bit of an obsession.  The first podcast which truly had me thoroughly engrossed and fascinated was episode #1035 with Paul Stamets who is a mushroom expert and researcher.  I don't know where I would even begin to summarize all of the incredibly interesting information he talks about so I will just very strongly recommend listening to it or watching it on YouTube if you have an interest in mushrooms.  He has made me view mushrooms as almost sentient beings.  Sounds like I've been living in rural Alaska for too long I know but listen to what he has to say and then judge me!

I have posted some photos and written a little about these mushrooms in the past.  These are the fly agarics which are one of the prettiest and well known mushrooms out in the forest.  This mushroom is in the Amanita genus which is the genus of mushrooms responsible for the vast majority of deaths from eating the wrong mushrooms.  This genus has species with common names like Death Cap and Destroying Angel so they are ones to be careful with.  This particular Amanita is very rarely deadly and has been used by many cultures in the world as a means to access the spirit world for insights into the world around them.  I don't have any personal experience with this mushroom as far as ingestion for a spiritual journey and from all that I have read about it, it seems a little too unpredictable for me to really want to experiment with.  I am an adventurous sort and love a good spiritual journey from time to time so I won't rule it out completely.  For now, I just really appreciate this mushroom for its beauty and mystery.  On the subject of hallucinogenic mushrooms, there has been a lot of interesting and very credible medical research in universities like Johns Hopkins and UCLA with the more reliable and "predictable" psilocybin mushrooms.  Medical research has found overwhelming positive benefit from the controlled use of psilocybe mushrooms to treat PTSD, depression, addiction, and to ease the mental duress of people with terminal illnesses.  It will be a slow transition for mainstream society to accept the true medical value of "magic" mushrooms but as we have seen with marijuana, results are hard to ignore.  There have also been a lot of interesting medical discoveries involving "normal" mushrooms over the last 5 or so years.  The Lion's Mane mushroom is not only very pretty but also regenerates neurons, regrows neural pathways in the brain, and has been shown to slow and even reverse the onset of dementia.  I could go on and on but will recommend listening to the podcast with Paul Stamets and some of his own video lectures as well as checking out the website fungi.com.  There are miracles in mushrooms!!

This hefty mushroom is one of the most prized and delicious of edible mushrooms but unfortunately for the photographer, it was a little on the rotten side when I found it.  This is a King Bolete.  This particular Bolete can weigh up to several pounds and get to a foot across at the top!  They are very difficult to find while they are still in a condition to be edible though here in Southeast AK as our wet environment causes them to rot quickly and insects seem to find them delicious as well.  Boletes are easily identified because instead of having gills underneath the cap like the prototypical mushrooms do, these guys have pores beneath the cap.

This was an exciting find for me as it was the first time I had seen this particular mushroom in the area.  I have seen them before but never in a place as easy to get to as this was.  This beautiful mushroom is called a scaly hedgehog.  It is edible but isn't really anything tasty enough to pick so I just left them to continue to look pretty under the trees.  These mushrooms are called toothed mushrooms as they have soft spinelike teeth underneath their caps rather than gills.

These two mushrooms are another type of toothed mushroom and are called hedgehogs.  You can see where the name comes from when you look at the soft spines underneath.  These mushrooms are excellent edibles.  I have several jars of them dried in my cupboard and usually pick some every year in my secret hedgehog place.  They go really well with some Sitka blacktail deer backstraps!  This is one of the easiest and safest edible mushrooms to identify as there are no dangerous lookalikes.  The teeth underneath and the look and color of a perfectly cooked pancake on the top are the ways in which I identify them.  Finding edible mushrooms in the forest, especially when you are intentionally looking for them, is a very pleasing experience.

Just some close up shots of the scaly hedgehogs.  I think they are really pretty.

Some macrophotography to show off just how pretty a mushroom can be.  This particular one looks metallic.

An aging Amanita.

Angel Wing mushrooms.  These are edible but are not particularly flavorful so I also leave these alone to do their thing in the forest.

This is not a particularly pretty mushroom nor is it edible but it is interesting from an arborist perspective as it provides a clue to the health of the spruce tree growing very nearby.  This fungus grows on the ground near the base of trees and indicates the strong possibility of rot within the nearby tree, specifically brown cubical rot.  In many ways, the various fungi are the orchestrators of how a forest grows.  The majority of fungi are not visible to us as they live underground interconnected with the soil and the plants growing in that soil, the mushrooms that mysteriously appear seemingly overnight sometimes are just the parts of the fungus that emerge to allow for reproduction.  It is fungi that provide the mechanism for so many processes that need to happen for there to be a forest at all.  They help trees obtain the nutrients they need from the soil in symbiotic partnerships, they weaken and kill some trees and then break them down into more soil, they provide food and protection to plants and animals and they offer we humans an opportunity to wonder at their mysterious existences.

Random

The summer of 2018 has more than made up for the lack of a summer in 2017.  We are in the midst of another hot and sunny stretch of weather with temperatures in the 70s and possibly the 80s with clear sunny skies.  There must have been at least 5 times as many sunny days so far this summer as there were all of the last.  Sandals, shorts, tank tops, sunscreen, and public service announcements warning of heat stress have been common this year.  Mmmmm, vitamin D!  

The lack of cloud cover has limited the number of Wrangell's incredible sunsets but a recent period of smoky haze brought here from Siberian forest fires on transcontinental winds did create some interesting Suns.

A few pictures of Castle Mountain one beautiful evening out on the water.

Father and daughter on another beautiful evening out on the water.  This is Bessie Peak on the left and Red Mountain on the right.  There is no alpine more beautiful than the alpine in southeast Alaska on a day like this.  When I am out on the water, I find myself looking longingly up at these mountains wishing I was up on their heights.

Just a couple of Bessie's north side.  It's hard to believe that these mountains are less than 4000 feet high, they look like they should be much higher.

A smoky sunrise while out on an overnight fishing trip, a successful fishing trip.

A pretty fish called a kelp greenling found near kelp beds oddly enough.

A well camouflaged ambush predator called a sculpin.  These are common but unwanted fish to catch while bottom fishing for more desirable fish like halibut or rockfish.

This last colorful fish is a yelloweye rockfish or just yelloweye, a prized catch and a beautiful fish with delicious meat great for tacos!  There are many species of rockfish with the yelloweye being one of the largest getting up to 36 inches in length.  These fish typically live in fairly deep water, over 100 feet, and can live more than 100 years!  The age of a fish is determined by counting the growth rings of their ear bones called otoliths.  This is done much like with a tree but is not quite as easy to do.  Notice the spines making up the dorsal fin of this guy?  That is another characteristic of rockfish, they have venomous spines on the dorsal fin that will zap you much like a bee or wasp sting.

It is deer, mountain goat, and black bear hunting season now in Southeast AK so I hope to have some more photos and blog posts in the not too distant future as I'll be getting out into the wilds a bit more.  Stay tuned

A Nature Story

Just a quick one here.  I would like to do more posts in which I make up some possible stories to explain a photo or photos that seem like they would have some interesting story behind them.  I recently did another trip up the Stikine River to gillnet sockeye and went for a hike in one of the mostly water-free sloughs in the hopes of seeing some wildlife or interesting tracks.  Bear, moose, and wolf tracks are pretty ubiquitous up there so it was no surprise to see plenty of sign of those animals but the less common track that I found was quite a few deer tracks.  It is a rare sight to see a deer up the Stikine so seeing tracks was interesting.

These are some of the ubiquitous moose and bear tracks commonly found up the Stikine.  What makes them interesting is their proximity to each other and the time in which they were made.  The big, deep track near the top of the photo is that of a cow moose, the smaller but similar track to the left is the track of her young calf.  The tracks behind them near the bottom of the photo are of an average size brown bear.  These tracks were made fairly close together in time as far as I could tell and the moose tracks appeared to show that they ran for a short stretch before resuming a more normal gait.  The bear tracks showed this bear to be following at some distance behind most likely, and at a normal but determined pace.  An ominous follower for that moose and her calf.  These tracks led across this muddy slough into the willows and then further into a grove of Cottonwood trees into which I did not follow as I am woods wise enough to know that if that bear had been successful in making a meal of that moose calf, I did not want to stumble upon it on its meal in that thick jungle of Devil's Club and willows.  I veered off down the slough and soon came upon another set of brown bear tracks that looked like the same bear, or at least a bear of pretty much exactly the same size.  These tracks were leading away from the Cottonwood grove into which the others had gone into.  I feel pretty sure that this was the same bear, what the interesting story part could be is what might have happened in that Cottonwood grove.  Was there a confrontation between moose and bear?  If so, did the cow moose successfully defend her calf from the predatory bruin?  Did the cow and calf avoid an encounter by picking up their pace and outdistancing the bear or did they swim across the river?  Did the bear have a successful stalk and hunt and get a meal of moose calf?  I wish I knew.  There are so many stories out there!  I do have a personal story involving a cow moose and calf and a lone wolf in which the wolf pursued the cow and calf across the very swift and strong Iskut River.  While I got to witness a lot of that story, I did not see the ending.  I'll go into more detail about that in a later post.

Independence Day

I decided to escape to the Stikine River for the 4th of July to spend a couple days away from the chaos and revelry that always accompanies the birth of our nation in Wrangell.  Wrangell REALLY enjoys the 4th, patriotism is still admired and unashamedly openly expressed.  One of the many reasons this place is a great place.  We love our country but many of us have a healthy skepticism and criticism of our government.  I think that is a general feeling in Alaska.

I spent a night camping up the river with a few friends gillnetting sockeye salmon during our latest stretch of very hot weather.  We have had another string of sunny clear days with temperatures nearing 80 so it was a great time to be in one of the most beautiful places on Earth catching food for the coming year.

This post isn't really much about the gillnetting portion of the trip, I just wanted to share a few photos of one of my favorite places (again).  This photo of our jet skiffs with one of the buoys of one of the nets off to the right is the only photo of actual gillnetting or salmon this post will have.

Almost a thunderstorm there over the distant mountains in Canada.

An eagle silhouette in a tree silhouette.

Same mountains, later in the evening.

The majority of the town of Wrangell plus hundreds of their family and friends from other places watching the boat races from the cruise ship dock.  We watched a few heats of the race from the boat on our way back to town on the 4th.

The Coast Guard was obviously poised to respond to any mishaps which fortunately did not occur.  I didn't get any good shots of the fast boats but there were some very speedy ones!  The fun of gillnetting was done for this trip and now the work of preparing and canning it begins!  I just bought a second canner so the work will be twice as fast at least.

The Other Sisters

So, this post will be a bit of a conglomerate of photos from several different trips from several different time periods but it will be all about the other two sisters of the Three Sisters Range to give a better perspective of why I am so infatuated with them.

Unfortunately, I have lost some photos from a Bessie Peak trip so can't show too much of her until I ask my friend Quentin if I can post his photos from that trip.  Anyway, let's meet Virginia's sisters!

Hopefully this sister looks familiar as she was the subject of the Virginia Peak post.  This is the north side of the Virginia Peak complex from the subalpine slopes leading to the summit of Helen Peak.  I explored Helen Peak during an overnight trip in July of 2014 which seems so long ago now!  This view is looking at Virginia's north side so I was looking to the south in this photo.

This is Bessie Peak and her daughter Bessie Junior looking at their south sides which means I was looking north (more northwest actually).  Helen Peak is between Bessie and Virginia, Bessie to the north, Virginia to the south.
Keep those lakes in mind as I will be talking more about them in a bit.  For whatever reason, I refer to them as Helen Lakes.

Just another view of Virginia before moving on further up the approach to Helen's summit.

It is still a fairly long way to the top of Helen Peak from this spot and at the time, I was ignorant as to the best, most efficient route to the top and thought traversing the north side of the ridge would save me A LOT of elevation gains and losses from going up and over the several high points along the ridge.  As seems to be the case with most things in life, trying to shortcut or cheat ultimately makes things more difficult in the long run and trying to traverse beneath the ridge was one of those cases as I kept getting stopped by impassable sheer rock faces causing me to either backtrack or climb straight up to the top of the ridge.  Trying to save time cost me more time and gave me at least two different high pucker factor moments that I would have been happy to have not experienced!  A bit of advice to those thinking about hiking in the high country of Southeast Alaska --  follow the animal trails!!  They know where the best routes are and have travelled them for many, many, many years.  I didn't say the animal trails are necessarily safe, easy, or for the casual hiker, but they do follow the BEST route.

That is Helen Peak close to the center of this photo with a beautiful alpine lake below.  I hope to get to that lake someday in the future.  The shoulder of Bessie is just in frame on the right.

These two photos are of one of the Virginia complex peaks .

More of Helen's summit from a little bit closer.  The bottom photo has Helen on the left with Bessie and Bessie Junior on the right.  

A Sitka-black tail buck and Virginia Peak.  I don't remember now just how many deer I saw on this trip but I do remember seeing at least 8 different bucks and at least as many does.  I honestly don't think any of these deer have ever seen a human before as the ones I was fairly close to didn't run away or actively approached me with very curious demeanors.  This buck in particular followed me for several minutes.  In the Virginia Peak post, I mentioned the fact that I know people who have been to the top of Bessie and Virginia but have personally never heard of anyone going to the top of Helen, the behavior of these deer was proof that humans very rarely venture into the alpine of Helen Peak.  In the bottom photo, the peak on the left is where I spent the night on my recent Virginia Peak trip.

There's the summit of Helen very close now with a deer trail leading right to the summit.  The summit of Helen is very broad with plenty of room to have a few dozen people.  It would be a great place for a wedding!  (And that probably explains why I have never been married better than I could ever explain!)

Bessie Peak from the summit of Helen Peak.  Look at that left side of Bessie!!  Wholly crap that is steep!  I can't believe I descended that with a big, heavy pack and then went down that descending ridge leading to the left, into that valley and then up the other side to Red Mountain!!  Sometimes I wish I had hobbies that were easier!  I expect to have artificial knees in the not so distant future!!

The view south from Helen's summit.

Another view to the south of the Virginia complex.

This is the view kind of to the southeast from Helen's summit.  On this trip, I camped on the vegetated knob to the left of the light gray colored knob above the lake.  This was a long hike!

A musk ox on the summit of Helen Peak?  This is Musty the musk ox my mountain climbing and adventuring mascot.  Yeah, I don't have a good explanation, it just became a thing.  That is Bessie Peak in the background.

Virginia Peak complex from Helen Peak

A view of the ridge leading to the summit of Virginia Peak.  The bears contemplating making little bears that I watched on the Virginia Peak trip were in the area in the bottom center of this photo.

The upper lake and its outlet looking down into the valley where Helen Lakes lie.

This pile of rocks is actually much more than a pile of rocks.  It is really more of a mystery than a pile of rocks.  The pretentious way of saying "pile of rocks" is cairn, it is also the more efficient way to type "pile of rocks" so I will refer to it as a cairn for the rest of this discussion.  These cairns are found throughout Southeast Alaska in the high alpine areas and are particularly well known in the Stikine River valley, my experience has also shown that they are prevalent in the Three Sisters Range as well.  I have found them on all of the sisters, Bessie, Helen, and Virginia, and on Red Mountain where there are quite a few of them with some of them being quite large requiring quite a bit of effort to build.  That was quite a few quites in that last sentence. These cairns are also obviously very, very old as determined by the growth of lichens on them that almost seem to hold the pile together like some sort of living mortar.  The most accepted theory as to what these cairns are, and the theory that makes the most sense to me personally, is that they are ancient route markers marking routes of travel when this land was covered by massive glaciers thousands of feet thick.  Contemporary geological evidence shows that most of Southeast Alaska was covered by ice sheets in the somewhat recent past with the exception being the very western coast and islands of SE AK.  My thought is that these cairns could have been route markers for some route into the interior of the mainland.  Interestingly, but very unscientifically proven, it seems to me from my explorations of the Three Sisters that the cairns I have found on Virginia, Helen, and Bessie's eastern ridges seem to line up fairly well with each other like they were some kind of waypoints to be lined up to reveal the route to cross the glaciers that must have filled the valleys separating the sisters from each other.  But, who knows?

Photos of Helen on the left and Bessie on the right with Helen Lakes between them.

These next several photos will take us out of the alpine and down to lake level.

This is not a particularly interesting photo but it helps to explain the upcoming ones.  This is Kunk Lake which is a pretty 1.3 mile hike from the saltwater on a human trail to a 3 sided shelter with an outhouse and woodshed.  There is also a rowboat provided allowing hikers to travel on the lake.  This is the view from the shelter with the long ridge leading to Helen Peak visible on the skyline, Helen Peak is the broad peak a little off center in the photo.  That ridge was the one I was hiking in the previous photos.  This next series of photos was from a trip that I did about 3 weeks ago in which I kayaked from Wrangell Island over to Etolin Island and the Kunk Lake trail, hiked up the trail to the shelter, rowed the rowboat across the lake to a spot roughly one quarter of the way into the this frame from the left side, hiked over to the creek that flows out of Helen Lake, hiked up that creek to Helen Lake with my packraft which is a small inflatable rubber raft, and then paddled around Helen Lake.  This trip, mainly the hike up the creek to Helen Lake, kicked my ass!  Scouting this trip from maps and Google Earth showed me that the creek flowed through a small gorge after it left the lake so I expected it to be difficult but I underestimated it a little.

Although I admittedly underestimated the difficulty of this trip, I did achieve my goal of getting to the lake.  I got to the lake much wetter and colder than I had hoped though which made me alter my plans fairly significantly.  That is Bessie and Bessie Junior in the distance.

I paddled to the far end of this lake with the intent of hiking to the other lake beyond this one with the packraft and paddling it.  This didn't happen.  The weather changed enough to be a deciding factor with clouds moving in front of the sun and a strong wind springing up.  By the time I got to the far end of the lake, I was pretty cold and my teeth were beginning to chatter a little.  I had a dry change of clothes with me so I wasn't too worried about hypothermia, my main concern was how I was going to get back to Kunk Lake from this lake as I DID NOT want to have to hike back down the creek through the gorge which I hiked up.  Hiking up the creek through the gorge required ascending two spots that I really did not want to have to negotiate going down and I fell twice on the way to the lake which could have resulted in injuries but fortunately did not.  I was somewhat certain that I could find a way out of this lake and back over into Kunk Lake but was concerned that I would not find one which would force me into retracing the hike down the creek through the gorge which filled me with a moderate level of worry and anxiety.  What I'm trying to say is, this wasn't a carefree day of frolicking in the woods, my body temperature was lowered, my anxiety level was heightened and my return trip was very uncertain so I did not accomplish my goal of getting to both lakes.  So be it and thank you for the lesson in humility Nature!

A closer look at Bessie.

A seagull nest on a log at lake level.  I think the gulls were too surprised to see a human here to harass me from their nest as they just flew above me rather quietly.

This is the outlet "creek" from the higher lake below Helen Peak that was in a few of the photos earlier in this post.

One last photo of Bessie.  The lake that I did not make it to is just on the other side of the trees on the bottom left of this photo.  It wasn't very far away from the edge of this lake but it didn't feel like a wise decision at the time for me to hike to it and in hindsight, while I'm disappointed I didn't get to it, I think it was the right choice for me to have made.  I did find a different way to get back over to Kunk Lake that was much safer and slightly easier than going back down the same way I came up so now I know how to get back here again in the future to get to that other lake!!  Stay tuned.