Professional mushroom pickers have flocked to the Cascade and the Boise National Forest`s in North America this month. Almost 1,000 pickers are camped out to hunt full-time for the morels sprouting in areas burned by last year’s devastating forest fires.
The pickers who come from all over America watch the news and the Internet to see where the picking is best. Many of them travel all year round in search of mushrooms with an experienced mushroom hunter being able to earn $50 - $80 dollars a day.
“It’s hard work,” said a picker named Tony — he declined to give his last name — as he sat around a campfire Sunday near Warm Lake, surrounded by buckets of morels. His tent was pitched beside dozens of others, tied to trees in a burned-out clearing. Blue tarps formed a vast sheltered space where tired pickers rested and chatted around fires.
“But it’s fun and good exercise,” said Koy Chounlabout, a spokeswoman of sorts for the picking community who gives her home as Oregon’s Willamette Valley. “It clears your mind.”
Mark Loseke, who is coordinating the Forest Service’s response to the influx, has never seen this many pickers —not even in the 1980s, when hundreds poured in after forest fires. As of Monday, his office in Cascade had issued 950 commercial permits costing $20 a week, and he expects the applications to keep coming.
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