Thanksgiving Mushrooming on the Pacific Coast

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Sea Ranch, CA

Miles: 3 round trip

Elevation Gain: Negligible

Dogs Allowed

I wanted to start this post with a little housekeeping:  Allison and I decided to not publish a post last week because we figured that you would all be too busy eating copious amounts of turkey to read our blog.  We also ate a large amount of turkey, but prior to the gluttony, we took part in the Ruork family tradition of hunting for wild edible mushrooms on Thanksgiving morning.  We will resume our retroactive posts starting next week.

This is the second year that I've gotten to participate in the mushroom hunting tradition.  The first time I went hunting with the family, three years ago, I was blown away by the diversity of mushrooms that grow wild in the forest on the pacific coast in Northern California.  I remember wishing I had taken a camera to document the diversity, and so when it came time to do it this year I made sure to bring our good camera so I could share the experience with everyone.

The view from Allison's Grandma's back yard

Before we get too far into this post I need to do a warning/disclaimer about consuming wild mushrooms:  The majority of mushrooms you find in the wild are poisonous with symptoms ranging from losing your lunch to death in a matter of hours.  When I go wild mushroom hunting with Allison's family there are always at least 3 people who are EXPERTS in local mushroom identification and who have been doing this their entire life.  And they only bother to collect 3-4 varieties so they avoid any danger. The point is, if you are not 200% sure you know a mushroom is edible don't eat it or touch it, as the toxins of some mushrooms can poison you through your skin.  Allison covered this in detail in a post a few years ago.

Alright, enough with the pleasantries...  On Thanksgiving morning, myself, Allison, and four of our other family members loaded up in the car and drove about a mile from her Grandma's house to our first mushroom hunting location of the day, the Sea Ranch airport.  Mushrooming in this part of the country has gotten more and more popular over the years and unfortunately for us, the woods around the airport had been picked over pretty thoroughly.

Allison's brother, James and his girlfriend, Kara
find the first edible mushroom of the day, a boletus. 

Luckily, a couple members of our group still found a couple of really nice edible mushrooms, and because the inedible mushrooms outnumber the edible varieties 20-1, I was able to get plenty pictures (see slideshow above) of beautiful inedible ones of to illustrate the diversity I mentioned above.

Allison's sister, Jessica harvesting another boletus

We were able to take Jaxx and also Allison's grandma's dog, Chip.  They both had a great time running around in the woods and helping us search for mushrooms.  After spending about an hour by the airport, we loaded back up in the cars and drove another mile or so to a series of hiking trails that the Sea Ranch HOA built and maintains.  We hiked about a mile in, looking for mushrooms the entire way.  You could really tell that I was the most inexperienced mushroom hunter as the day wore on.  I ended up not finding a single edible mushroom the entire day.  The others continued to find mushrooms, mostly boletus and we ended up with a good 10 cups worth by the end of the day.  Throughout the day we hunted in small groups or as individuals, in order to not cover the same area.  We stayed out on the trails for about an hour and a half.

Mushrooms hung to dry above the fireplace

Allison's grandma, Edith wanted us home to start cooking the turkey by 2 and as it got to be around 1:30 we started rounding everyone up and low and behold we couldn't find Allison's Dad, Steven, who had been running around with a large cooking knife, in his hand, which he was using to cut the stems of the mushrooms he was finding.

Allison: My dad is out in the woods all the time, and sometimes gets so caught up in what he is doing he loses track of time. So initially, it wasn't strange that Dad wasn't with us, and nobody was particularly worried. However, as time wore on and we kept whistling (which is how we keep in touch in the woods) and we got no answers we started to get concerned. We headed back toward the car, hoping he had headed in that direction. We waited there for about 15 minutes, but still no word. My brother James, Chris and Kara headed back along the trail to look for Dad, while Jessica and I waited at the car with the dogs in case he returned. 

After another 15 minutes they reappeared, but still no Dad. Now, anybody who knows me knows, that I have a pretty high thresh-hold before I start worrying, but once I start it's like wildfire. By this time I was pretty much certain that Dad had tripped and impaled himself on his knife while falling into a ravine where he had broken his neck. He was probably lying there trying to whistle but during the fall he had bitten off his tongue, so could only gurgle with his bit off tongue, stab wound and broken back. Yeah, this is how my brain works most of the time, I'm just relatively good at keeping the crazy to myself.

We decide that two people will go off down one trail and the other pair will go down the other. Chris and Jessica went down a nearby fire road, while James and Kara headed back on the original trail and cut in to where we had been mushrooming. I don't particularly like waiting, especially when I'm worried, so I'm pretty sure I looked completely nutso to anybody who drove by. Wild-eyed, pacing by the side of the road, and occasionally talking to myself... you know, like normal, completely sane people do.

After another 10 minutes or so James and Kara returned with Dad in tow. He just hadn't heard us calling, though James' whistle could break glass. I didn't care, I was just glad he was back. Now Chris and Jessica were gone.... Dad was completely sure they'd gotten themselves lost back on the fire-road, which I thought a bit ironic. I wasn't too concerned since I know Chris has a good sense of direction, and wouldn't have strayed off the main path. James ran back to find them, in about 5 minutes we were all back together, though we had a mighty need for sandwiches.