I was out east of Monroe today at around 2000 feet of elevation at the usual spot. It's been three weeks since I was last here - family visiting two weeks ago and inertia overwhelming me last week - so I was curious about what I would find. We haven't had much rain in the meantime - so I didn't have high hopes. And the hopes were well placed.
The woods weren't especially dry and it was a great day to stumble through them in shirtsleeves - it was also nice to head back to the car with dry boots and pant legs for a change.
I wandered around and came home with three pounds of relatively nice chanterelles. I found a LOT of past-prime mushrooms and left them to drop their spores. Here's are a couple photos representative of probably 100 of these past-prime specimens that I passed over.
The most likely spots for finding chanterelles today were in the 6 or 8 foot diameter (and maybe 3 feet deep) sinkholes that are common in that part of the forest. I checked out every one of them that I came across and often found chanterelles. I think it's probably a case of these spots holding more moisture than the surrounding forest floor. Here's one of the holes with a chanterelle nestled in the bottom.And for you beginners - look for forests with Douglas fir (they're the trees with the gnarly rough bark) and salal on the ground...
And here's a spot that had a bunch of chanterelles. At the time I got out my GPS to mark the spot, but when I looked there was already a bookmark at "0 feet" distance that said simply, "Great". So I guess I had been here before...
And while chanterelles were the target for today's expedition - there were other mushrooms that were photogenic enough to get my attention...
