Mushroom hunters have just about picked the areas northwest of Durango Mountain Resort clean – especially between the ski area and Scotch Creek, where we’ve hunted boletus for the last 30 years. Still, today’s foraging in the woods turned up about 10 pounds of choice edibles, nearly all on the road to Bolman Pass.
Seven small bags of mushrooms are now ready for the freezer – six sauteed in butter and garlic and one bag of barely blanched “bear claws’” that will be the basis for a holiday pate or homemade ravioli served at Christmas.
I’m often asked how mushroom hunting has changed since the days when my husband and I took our then toddler-aged sons and Airedales into the woods to carry on a family tradition he learned from his grandparents.
Certainly more folks are foraging today. More are well-informed and open to trusting what grows in the wild. I can recall a dinner nearly 20 years ago when I served sauteed boletus with veal, only to watch guests drop their forks in unison, completely horrified.
Boletus looks like porcini. In fact, they are porcini – just porcini in the wild. Chanterelles are well accepted today, too. Many restaurants feature them as high-end menu favorites.
Bear claws, or bear paws – my husband calls them by both names – are coral mushrooms. Most field guides advise corals be eaten with caution. I picked a lot of them today. Every time I do, I think of the argument I had with my husband in the early days, not long after I settled in Durango.
He insisted these hairy-looking, pine-needle-covered clumps were fine. I pointed to my mushroom field guides that all seemed to say the opposite. Diarrhea guaranteed, I warned. We finally settled the argument by taking an armload directly to Irene Perino, who lived a stone’s throw from Sacred Heart Church.
We walked into her tiny kitchen and dumped the treasures before her. She was confined to a chair by then, but without missing a beat she told me to go to her silverware drawer, where a 1959 National Geographic featured an illustration of the mushrooms she called “manini,”or “little hands.”
Perino, like many of the Italians who lived in old Durango, canned mushrooms whenever they were lucky enough to stumble on a bumper crop. Little hands were among her favorite, she said, pointing to a half-dozen pints she had stored in her pantry.
Irene Perino is now gone, as are most of the old Italians from Silverton who closely guarded their mushroom patches, taking only trusted friends under their wings on these August hikes in the high country.
I take anyone curious enough to tag along. Ironically, in an extended family of mushroom hunters, I can boast that I am among the most successful, even though I’ve been hunting for fewer summers than the old timers.
I tell young parents that they live in a learning lab far better than anything Where’s Waldo can offer. Children learn observation skills when they hike with mom and dad – when parents point out the dappled sunlight on fallen pines in the conifer forest. They soon notice on their own that there’s a smell associated with the morning after rain that encourages these treasures to poke through the earth. Eventually they notice what grows alongside the mushrooms – the mountain potentilla, wild strawberries and raspberries, lupine and Indian paintbrush.
What has changed? My children are now in the driver’s seat, gathering up the knives and the sacks, loading the dogs in the car and eager to make the day trip, nagging their parents to get a move on.
I am no longer disappointed if I occasionally get “skunked” and return home empty-handed.
There’s one thing I can be sure of: there’s no such thing as a disappointing day on a mushroom-hunting expedition. It renews the spirit like nothing else. It awakens us in the deepest parts of our psyche.
We’re so lucky to live where we can heal ourselves by simply taking a walk in the woods.
