Mushrooms. Delicious, but potentially dangerous, even deadly, if you’re an amateur forager. Still, Southern Californians are heading for the outdoors with the wild-eyed lust of Gold Rush prospectors.
Our state’s exceptional rainy season kick-started the craze. Since December, a dozen storms have drenched the landscape and all that moisture has brought out so many varieties of fungi that traditional and social media are lighting up the internet about the ‘Shroom Boom.
But foragers need to be especially careful: More mushrooms mean more chances to get it wrong.
“When we have this amazing, incredible year, we can just find them everywhere,” said Bat Vardeh, 26, of Pasadena. She’s the founder of the Foraging and Mushroom Hunting Women of SoCal and field trip chair of the Los Angeles Mycological Society. She’s also a collector for the Fungal Diversity Survey, or FunDiS, which documents and protects the biodiversity of fungi throughout North America.
On a sunny Saturday morning, collecting box in hand, Vardeh led a merry band through Black Star Canyon in south Orange County. These days, you’ll see mushroom scavengers in parks and wilderness areas throughout Southern California, such as the Cleveland National Forest, Los Padres National Forest and Angeles National Forest. (Wherever you go, always check with park rangers about whether collecting mushrooms is allowed and how to go about it — the rules vary from place to place.)
Before starting off, Vardeh explained that in a dry year, mushroom gatherers look for micro climates, areas that have a topography or geography that improve fungi growing conditions, such as a canyon with dark shaded areas and a creek running through it.
But on this day, the group found more than a half dozen varieties right beside the trail including caramel-colored Helvella acetabulum, also called vinegar cups, which smell cheesy and are edible when thoroughly cooked to remove toxins, and inocybaceae, mushrooms from a…
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