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.