From the Idaho Panhandle

Idaho Panhandle Experiences Autumn of Unusual Fungal Fecundity

By Cate Huisman, 10-10-10

	A small sampling of what could be gathered in ten minutes' time along a trail outside of Sandpoint.

What panhandle forests have withheld in huckleberries and overtime pay for wildland fire fighters in this odd, cold, wet year, they are now making up for in the most prolific profusion of mushrooms in recent memory.

Members attending the most recent meeting of the North Idaho Mycological Association in Coeur d’Alene brought in huge collections of fungi, including species that even the most mature fungophiles in the group could not identify, as well as large baskets of king boletes and matsutakes, choice edibles from the Priest River area. If they had all been living in Japan, they could have gotten wealthy off the sale of the matsutakes alone. The largest was the size of a volleyball, and the man who found it proposed generously that it be sliced up pie-wise and distributed among attendees who had found fewer edible species.

This blogger has personally annoyed fellow mountain bike riders over the past month with her constant stops to pick from among the surfeit of species lining the forest trails above Sandpoint. It’s been difficult to bike anywhere without identifying a dozen different kinds, and even a walk into town will reveal another dozen in local lawns and empty lots.

Harley Barnhart—unofficial dean of NIMA, distinguished mushroom cook and photographer, and widower of the late Kit Scates-Barnhart, a noted mycophile—remembers his wife saying that every eight or ten years, the amount of mushrooms would, well, mushroom. For enthusiastic members of the slightly eccentric subset of humanity that has a fondness for fungi, it is exhilarating to be wandering the woods of the panhandle in a period of such fungal abundance.

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