Early in the summer, Evie, my husband and I got to spend the weekend with my pals Laura and Ingunn and their families too. We met at Laura’s cabin near Snoqualmie Pass and huddled around a map that felt very much like a treasure map. We were looking for treasure of the fungi variety. We picked a spot, made a plan, geared up and headed out.

Evie was so excited to hang out with her mushroom-hunting friends for her first foray. They started out great- identifying mushrooms, pointing to them and yelling. It was effective in getting our attention, but the identification skills were a bit lacking, at least for Evie. None of the mushrooms she found were edible and a few pine cones even found there way in there.

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We split up and worked our way through the woods. We found areas of disturbance that seemed ripe for morels, but we didn’t have any luck. Finally, as we all met back on the forest road, I spotted one right next to the road on an old leaf pile. Then we found another. It seemed that the best place to look was not deep in the woods, but rather in the unlikeliest spot. We scrounged up a handful along the way. Not enough for a feast, but perhaps enough for a fancy snack.

On the way back down the mountain we stopped to frolic in lupine and balsamroot and to try our luck at more morel spotting. We didn’t add to our stash but we did find an animal skull. We all gathered around it for inspection. Our best guess was that it was a fox skull. We left it on top of a tree stump like a sort of talisman and hoped for better luck next time.

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Back at the cabin we settled in around the campfire for s’mores and stick bread. I set up our gatherings to take some photos and I found, of all things, a perfect little morel under the wooden bench. Of course this spurred a thorough search of the area for more, but there was only one.

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My husband couldn’t stay the night, and the next day the group headed out farther for another foray (I later learned that they found lots more morels). I decided to head home with Evie and Nali instead and on the way stopped for a walk around Gold Creek Pond. I had high hopes that Evie could even walk the whole one mile on her own.

To my utter delight, she did! I’ll admit that I shamelessly bribed her with a “special treat” if she walked the whole way. It totally worked. On the way home we stopped for a strawberry milkshake to share. It was the first trail she hiked all on her own, her first strawberry shake, and her first mushroom foray. A special weekend for sure!

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The Way Through the Woods by Long Litt Woon

Long Litt Woon moved to Norway from her home in Malaysia at age 18 for school. There she met her Norwegian husband and settled down. But when her husband dies suddenly in an accident, she looks for something to fill the newly opened gap in her life. She devotes herself to mushrooms by learning everything she can about them. She joined mushroom societies and became an expert in edible mushroom hunting. There is a huge culture of mushroom hunting in Norway and I learned so much about mushrooms from this book. Ultimately, Long seeks a distraction from her loss but she ends up gaining a supportive community along the way.