The first thing you have to know about this festival is how to say it: Yah-Hots with an emphasis on the first syllable. The second thing to know is that Cape Perpetua and the Yachats area is a little slice of heaven. We spent several days exploring the coastal areas north and South of Yachats and then attended their mushroom festival. We can’t wait to go back! It is hard to know where to even start talking about it.
Old Growth Finds
Over the years we have been fortunate to make great friends who also love mushroom hunting. A couple days before the festival began we met up with a few folks to explore the area. Nathan and Kate are two experienced foragers from Michigan, who like us, were just discovering the area. Joseph and Elica are knowledgable local foragers who have forgotten more than we know. At the beginning of the week we explored old growth forests a few miles inland from the ocean. We found lots of chanterelles, lobsters and a few cauliflowers too. The chanterelles were mostly found in deep ferns where they could thrive despite the dry conditions and the cauliflowers were next to giant stumps of old cut trees. Lobsters on the other hand were pretty random… with the side of the roads being good for them.
- Spiderwebs: A hazard of bushwacking
- A beautiful specimen
- Elica with a bouquet of golden chanties
- A bag of chanterelles – enough for a feast
- Not a chanterelle! See the gills? Notice it is not white inside the mushroom?
- The top of the False Chanterelle (Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca) can look like a real one@
- Joseph with a few nice Cauliflower mushroom specimens found in old growth. (Sparassis crispa)
- A lobster mushroom hiding on the side of the road
- Lobsters in a dehydrator. These dry up and store well.
Coastal Dunes
After a day in the big trees up in the rain forest, we headed for the dunes to find matsutakes (Tricholoma magnivelare). These fragrant mushrooms are highly prized in Asia and many commercial hunters frequent the coastal region. They are unusual in that you don’t fry them in butter or dehydrate them. They can be frozen, but seem best prepared in water. We thinly sliced just one mushroom and made several meals by adding it to ramen style noodle soup or simple steamed rice. The flavor and aroma of a matsutake is truly unique, it’s a mushroom we are still trying to figure out how to best prepare. They are often found in the dunes where they are mycorrhizal with pines in October and November especially.
- Matsutake from below
- Matsutake from above
- Matsutake. Notice the short and blunt stem (stipe)
- This is typical of the coastal forest with a pine and spruce mix. Both Matsutakes and Porcinis can be found here. You can see the big spruce in the front with lots of huckleberry shrubs
- This is also a typical forest, but 100% pine. The matsutake are found here. It is pretty easy to wander around in – open and sandy.
- Two nice matsies
Cat’s Paws in the Marsh
On Friday we spent the day with Wallace Kaufman, a new friend we met at the NAMA foray in Salem. Wallace is an author, a poet, a professional mediator, a scientist and all around renaissance man with a homestead near the Yaquina river. I still cannot pronounce Yaquina properly. But, in that neck of the woods they call the marsh a “slough” (pronounced ‘slew’) which is tidal in nature and goes up and down several feet each day. So we were basically foraging at sea level a few miles in from the Pacific ocean along salt water marsh edges – yet another unique ecosystem. The sloughs themselves are full of oysters and also host river otters (we didn’t spot any but saw promising footprints). The mushroom we were seeking on this day was the Catathalasma (Catathalasma ventricosa aka cat’s paw, cat stalk, or mock matsutake) which is a close relative of the Matsutake. It looks like a Matsie but has an elongated and tapered stalk and smells vaguely of cucumbers – the matsutake smells like cinnamon red hots to me (and some say dirty socks). Once you have a nose for the two, they are very different. The books will tell you Catathalasma are tough and require a lot of cooking. We peeled the caps, fried them up in butter freshly picked, and found that they were firm in texture and mild in flavor. Quite appealing!
- Wallace feeding Grey Jays from his deck. He calls them and they come eat peanuts right out of your hand!
- Right before they went into butter
- We think this is the Catathalasma ventricosa as opposed to the C. imperialis. It looks like a Matsutake
- The Catahalasma ventricosa
- See the long elongated stalk? Matsutakes don’t have these… but otherwise look very similar.
- An excellent mushroom cookbook Wallace shared with us
Let the Festival Begin
Yachats festivities kicked off on Friday night with a mushroom themed dinner. It was planned brilliantly – about six different restaurants contributed yummy meals – they charged $18 to attend the dinner and try everything. One highlight was baking wild mushrooms (chanterelles) right into hearty bread. I thought it was olive bread until I dipped it into our mushroom soup and was like wow! They also had a nice salad with cold chanterelles mixed in the greens and a chanterelle dressing that had chunks of mushrooms in a creamy vinaigrette with bacon. Three new ways to deliver chanterelles into my belly!
Meanwhile, all around town, the local restaurants were featuring wild mushroom centric menus for the weekend – but, perhaps that is normal in Yachats? There was also a small street market that had vendors selling mushroom soup, cultivated mushrooms, and wild mushrooms in all their forms.
- Wild and Cultivated Mushroom Products – see the giant Cathalasma in lower right?
- Rain Forest Mushrooms sold cultivated mushrooms – oysters, lions main, shitake, maitake and more.
- Mushroom Kits for sale
- These mixed mushroom baskets were a hit.
- Ona Restaurant Menu
- Green Salmon Coffee Company Menu for the Mushroom Fest weekend
Forays and Classes
On Saturday and Sunday we attended some forays and classes. Joe Spivack of the Cascade Mycological Society led our first foray. It was excellent – Joe really knows his mushrooms! He provided a great introduction to different types of mushrooms based on whether they lived on tree roots (mycorrhizal), organic material (saphrotic), or on other mushrooms (parasitic). This foray took place in the Cape Perpetua campground which was a few hundred feet above sea level but only about a mile from the coast. My favorite takeaway was learning how to identify two of the local coastal conifers. In that particular ecosystem, most of the trees were Western Hemlocks or Sitka Spruce. And they were HUGE! In the campground, there was a clearing with large old-growth Hemlocks and Spruce on the south side and Red Alders on the North side of the clearing. All the cool mushrooms we found were on the South side of the clearing, close to hemlock or spruce. Mycorrhizal mushrooms win round one.
Sitka Spruce (Picea sitchensis) loves lower altitude moist environments and lives within 20 miles of the Pacific ocean. It has a very characteristic “flared” base, especially as the tree gets older. The bark is dark and scaly (smoother and lighter on younger trees). Needles were 1 – 1.5 inches long, very stiff and sharp, and shaped like a bottle brush, coming off the stem at 360 degrees.
- Flake Scaly spruce bark.
- Spruce bark. Notice you cannot really follow a furrow very far.
- Spruce needles, note the radial bottle brush 360 layout.
Western Hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) are more widely distributed than the Sitka Spruce, occurring on the Western and Eastern slopes of the moist coastal range of Oregon and onto the Western slope of the Cascades. They have very small egg-shaped cones, about 1″ and short needles that are formed like bird wings and can have some spacing between them. Also, the twig can have different length needles right next to each other (short and shorter). The bark has more obvious furrows running vertically up and down the tree, but, they are not deep (the Douglas Fir has very deep furrows as the tree gets older) ridges running. In the forest, their bark is very obvious compared to the Sitka Spruce and the base of the tree doesn’t flare like the spruce.
- Western Hemlock
- Needles of the Western Hemlock
- Bark of the Western Hemlock
On Saturday afternoon we adventured out on another foray with Ja Schindler and Valerie Nguyen of Fungi for the People on a trail in Cape Perpetua. We learned a lot about local polypore mushrooms on that trip like Porodaedelea pini, Trametes versicolor, Ganoderma brownii, Fomotopsis pinicola, Ganoderma applanatum. We were excited to find our first Oregon Reishi – Ganoderma oregenense – during the hike. Ja gave us some tips on how to find Reishi which we successfully put to the test the next day.
- Cape Perpetua in the Siuslaw National Forest
- Valerie on the left, Carl in the middle, Ja on the right.
- We found this polypore on the hike.
- Reishi that looks like a crawfish. The shiny surface is a tell-tale sign of the Reishi. Only the stem is shiny here because spores have fallen on the top surface (or been lifted up and over by rising air currents and dropped on itself) and made the surface a dull brown. It wipes right off though and was shiny after we cleaned it.
- This is an air graft between two spruces. The one on the right is younger with smoother bark.
- Douglas Fir. Note the deep furrows! The Doug firs were not commonplace this close to the coast but a few mile in they were very common.
Sunday was our final day in the area. I taught a class about mapping Pacific Northwest burn morels to a large and receptive group, super fun. After that we spent some time on the nearby beaches investigating tidal pools. As if the forests and abundance of food aren’t enough, there are fascinating, easily accessible beaches up and down the coast. Also popular in the area: agate collection, clamming, musseling, crabbing and salmon fishing. See you next year, Yachats!
- Truffle dog demonstratoin
- Yachats Village Mushroom Fest poster
- Burn Morels of the Pacific Northwest
- This is from my Morel presentation – Gaia maps are awesome!
- Miles and miles of this!
- Beach in the late afternoon at low tide
- late afternoon beach scene
- Fun on the beach
- Tidal Pool
- Another tidal pool denizon
- Found this in a tidal pool
- Ganoderm applandum found on the ID Table.
- Matsutakes at the ID Table
- Catathalasma at the ID table. The call these the ventricosa species though.
- Bread & Roses coffee shop and bakery became a regular stopping point for coffee, chai and a loaf of fresh baked bread
We at the Wild Rivers Mushroom Club located in Brookings, Oregon would like to invite you and everyone to attend our Second annual Wild Rivers Mushroom Festival on November 3-4, 2018 at the Chetco Activity Center in Brookings,Oregon. We will have displays, volunteers answering your questions, food and drink, a silent auction and speakers, most notably, Professor Dennis DeJardin from San Francisco state University.
Thank you Paul! Wish we could attend this year, we love the Brookings area. Folks – check out the Wild Rivers Mushroom Festival this weekend. https://wildriversconnect.org/cal/wild-rivers-mushroom-festival-2018/2018-11-03/