Missoula Postcard - Fungus Rising
Originally Published in The New Yorker July 29, 2002
© Steven Rinella

Though the seventy-one-thousand-acre Moose Fire that visited northwestern Montana last summer may have destroyed millions of board feet of timber, redirected hundreds of family vacations, and displaced a handful of households, it proved to be a thoughtful guest after all. Plenty of snow fell on the mountainsides over the winter, and the blackened trees looked like week-old stubble. In the spring, the snowmelt turned the forest floor into deep ashen muck. Then a few warm days came along, and—voilà!—pay dirt. Multitudes of spongy black morel mushrooms rose from the earth. Area residents, victims last summer of drought and fire, are now beneficiaries of a bumper crop of one of the most precious kinds of fungus in the world of haute cuisine. "I had five different guys in one day come in here trying to sell me morels," said Steve Jordan, the co-owner of the Dinosaur Cafe, in Missoula, more than a hundred miles south of the fire. Jordan has been selling a morel velouté for four bucks a bowl, and morels at the Missoula Farmers' Market are as common as green beans and almost as cheap.

Morels, any of various edible mushrooms of the genus Morchella, range across much of North America, but, because they are notoriously finicky about soil conditions and other variables, people who consistently find them are considered shamanistic by those who don't. Morels appear beneath dead elm trees in Illinois, under decaying tulip poplars in Virginia, and among certain aspen stands in Washington. To find a good morel spot takes luck and hours of wandering through forests. If you know about one, you keep it secret. But a forest fire in the right habitat can change that.

Cathy Cripps, a mycologist at Montana State University, said," We think that the intense heat helps germinate latent mushroom spores or sclerotia on the forest floor, or that the radical change in soil chemistry encourages the existing mycelium"—the mushroom's underground root system—"to suddenly proliferate, or that both these things happen. Good forest fires make it so you can find morels just by watching the national news."

In other words, this summer just about anyone can go to the Moose Fire (as both the fire and the area it burned are known) and load up on a fungus that is usually a bastard to catch. The burn lies mostly within the boundaries of the Flathead National Forest and Glacier National Park. The Outside North Fork Road, which runs along the North Fork of the Flathead River, is the Moose Fire's Main Street. It begins in Columbia Falls, Montana, and ends about sixty miles north, at the Canadian border.

One recent morning, a dozen or so vehicles were parked at odd angles on both shoulders, doors ajar; the scene brought to mind the termination of a car chase in a movie. A middle-aged man and woman walked from their car into the first line of downed and scorched trees, past people coming out of the woods with grocery sacks and baseball caps full of morels. A soot-covered man who had turned the front of his blue sweatshirt into a sort of mushroom pouch recruited passing motorists. "Morels!" he called out. "They're all over in there."

In the burn, the smell of smoke hung in the air. The trees and the ground were black, but, as you pushed deeper into the forest, it was still able to perform its best trick: the road and the cars disappeared, and then the sound of the road disappeared, too. Birds chirped. A cursory inspection revealed a morel growing at the bottom of a weeks-old moose track. The mushroom was well camouflaged, but once you'd seen it many more popped into view: the forest floor was littered with morels. Off in the distance, a man shouted, "Have you seen a tall, skinny-looking dude wandering around out there like he's lost?" Another man responded that he had not. "Well, are you finding mushrooms over there, too?" the first man said.

"Shitloads."

Back on the road, cars were coming and going. A pickup truck that had left earlier returned with a new set of passengers. A motor home with Michigan plates pulled in behind the pickup, and a family piled out with empty snack-food boxes. The father, whose belly was pinched up against the steering wheel, was the last one out.

"We've heard of morels growing just north of our home, in Big Rapids, Michigan, but we never bothered trying to find them," he said. "But, as long as we're here, we figured, what the hell."

— Steven Rinella