Cascade foothills fungi
It had been raining for three days and my friend said it was time. She knows a logging road in the foothills that she says has the best fungi patch within driving distance. I don’t ask more questions than that.
We walked maybe half a mile off the road on an elk path and spent two hours on our knees. Found: a single magnificent Amanita muscaria, a pretty obvious Chicken of the Woods on a stump, some kind of gorgeous purple Cortinarius that I wasn’t going to touch without expert help, and a cluster of Lobster Mushrooms that she identified immediately.
She cut three of the Lobsters to bring home for dinner (with permission and a knowledge of which mushrooms are legal to harvest in a national forest — don’t freelance this). I was just there for photographs and I was happy with a handful of frames.
Light was dim enough that I ended up on the tripod for everything serious. Moss and cedar duff gets a lot of the credit for how the photos turn out — you cannot get a good mushroom shot without good substrate.
Bird-wise: a Varied Thrush called from somewhere we never found. A Pacific Wren scolded us for five minutes. A Chestnut-backed Chickadee made the usual chickadee impression. Otherwise the woods were quiet.
Ate a very fine Lobster Mushroom risotto that evening. I did not shoot the risotto.
