Mushrooms beginning to show up in the mountains
Published 1:00 pm Saturday, May 4, 2024
- Morel mushrooms are a great natural treasure you can find all over Oregon. Look in damp, shaded soil during the late spring.
PENDLETON — With temperatures rising — at least between spring snow flurries — mushrooms are beginning to appear in the Blue Mountains.
People picking mushrooms on national forests for their own use don’t need a permit so long as they don’t pick, possess or transport more than a gallon of mushrooms in Oregon (five gallons in Washington).
This personal-use policy applies on the Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur national forests.
Those who want to either exceed those limits, or who want to sell mushrooms picked on the national forests, need to buy a commercial permit.
Commercial permits, which are available to people 18 or older, cost $2 per day, with a minimum purchase of $20 (10 days). An annual commercial permit, valid through Dec. 31, 2024, costs $100.
Commercial picking is not allowed in wilderness areas. Personal-use picking is allowed in those areas.
Commercial pickers who plan to camp overnight on national forest land are also required to buy an industrial camping permit. Those are available at Forest Service offices.
Picking places
The correlation between recently burned areas and a proliferation of mushrooms is a mycologically proven one.
To that end, the Forest Service maintains an interactive website, accessible from each national forest website, that shows where prescribed fires have burned in the past few years. The National Interagency Fire Center’s website has information about wildfire locations.
Blue Mountain national forest websites:
• www.fs.usda.gov/wallowa-whitman
‘When in doubt, throw it out’
That’s the advice that mushroom aficionados heed. Many forest mushrooms are poisonous, so pickers should be capable of identifying edible varieties such as morels. There are many guidebooks available at bookstores and libraries, as well as online guides.
