2023 Burn Morel Maps Released!

Releasing the burn morel maps every season is a highlight of our year!  We love to share burn morel hunting tips, and trade ideas with our tribe. As we send the maps out into the world this year, we hope you are excited for the 2023 hunt. We also have some new tech (new interfaces for precipitation, burn severity, timber cuts, MVUM access, and tree cover) in production that will help foragers – coming soon 3/1/23!

Purchase 2023 Burn Morel Hunting Maps >

The Highlights

2023 will be an excellent year with good potential hunting grounds across the West.

2023 Fire Data:

• 2.63 Million acres of burns
• 11 Western states (not including Nevada or Alaska)
• Total of 1300+ fires

Curated down to:

• 233 fires with potential
• total of 260 thousand acres

A Ratings:

• 59 “A” rated fires that were the best
• total of 155 thousand acres
• averaging 26 thousand acre per fire.

Best States for 2023 Burn Morel Hunting:

• California
• Idaho
• New Mexico

Close Seconds with Solid Opportunity:

• Oregon
• Washington
• Montana

Slim Picking in:

• Wyoming
• Colorado
• Arizona
• South Dakota

This year we released V1 of our maps with the curated burns (not ALL burns) and the morel probability overlays. We will be adding lots of other layers and datapoints over the next few weeks. Here are some highlights of what you can expect to see soon: Morel Probability, Burn Severity, Stewardship Maps, MVUM Maps, Tree & Forest Types, and Precipitation Maps. Click on the images below to see an explanation of each image!

 

Some of our map ideas are exciting because they extend beyond the normal burn morel scene into disturbance morels via thinning and clear-cutting maps – these “thins” are popular places for savvy hunters to search.  Generally, look for the thins to fruit earlier than burns because they are a different species of morel – Morchella snyderi we think.

Purchase 2023 Burn Morel Hunting Maps >

Likewise, we added burns all around the continental US (CONUS) t00 because many morel hunters in the midwest, east, and southeast like to hunt burns – and timber thin areas too.

Our rain map is exciting because you can use it to gauge regional rainfall across all of North America. Based on our experience, we like it when there is regular rain (once a week) of 1″ or more for six consecutive weeks – this makes the perfect environment for not just morels, but most mushrooms. Our maps show rain totals, weekly, for the last six weeks as well as an aggregate score that combines each weeks data. By this score, a spot that got 6 inches of rain last week, but no rain the previous 5 weeks would score poorly. But, a spot that got 1 inch of rain, for six consecutive week would achieve a perfect score…as I write this, areas near Seattle are the only places with a perfect score. But there is a nice spot in Montana, between Helena, Bozeman, West Yellowstone and Dillon that looks good:

While we are excited by all this new technology, we are once again worried by potential burn closures. Oregon and California are especially problematic where we’ve seen local forest service offices closing down entire burns to foragers in previous years, presumably to allow the salvage timber harvest unfettered access.