Colorado Mycological Society President Jon Sommer used a homemade, hand-picked mushroom soup to romance his wife when they first met in college. At an event at the Bookworm in Edwards on Thursday, Sommer told the crowd he was down to his last jar of canned chanterelles at the time, and had been saving them for a special occasion. Like a good forager, he knew when the time was right.
His wife and him are now celebrating 34 years of marriage. It was a quick story among several told by Sommer, used to emphasize how chanterelles are able to be preserved for long periods of time. But the story also showcased how, for some, mushroom hunting is a passion that can lead to some of the most memorable moments in a person’s life.
Sommer lives in Conifer and spends time all over the state hunting mushrooms. He said one of his most memorable experiences from Eagle County recently was during the summer of 2022, when a large crop of rare morel mushrooms popped up in the Sylvan Lake burn scar following a few weeks of rain. “Everytime I went up there I got a few pounds of morels,” he said.
“They started growing in about June, at about 8,500 feet, and they would march up the mountain as it got later in the season, until about August they were at 11,000 feet.” The morels that grow in burn-scar areas, known as burn morels, grow only in North America, usually in the West, and only during years following a large forest fire, Sommer said. That makes them exceptionally rare, and also highly prized.
“There’s people who just travel around the country chasing these burns,” Sommer said. The rare nature of burn morels have attracted a commercial industry in North America, and they’re not the only mushroom found in Eagle County that has commercial value. The matsutake mushroom, which is found in lodgepole forests, is part of a $22 billion per year industry in Japan, where they were long considered a luxury good.
The matsutake, which grows alongside red pines in Japan, has been a staple of luxury Japanese cuisine going back to ancient times, but became scarce in that country in the later half of the 20th century due to the degradation of red pine forests there. In the 1980s it was discovered that matsutake mushrooms were growing abundantly in the American West, and the United States started exporting the mushrooms to Japan. “At one point in the early 2000s they were up to $300 a pound wholesale on the West Coast,” Sommer said.
“And then about 15 years ago, the Japanese decided they liked the ones in Southeast Asia a little better, so the majority of the ones that are exported to Japan now come from a few nonprofits in China and Korea and Nepal. It’s a big deal, in China they literally built roads, airports and warehouses just to support the matsutake industry.” In Colorado, matsutake mushrooms grow under lodgepole pine around 9,000 feet in elevation, usually during the fall.
“Sometimes they’re really abundant,” Sommer said, sharing a story of how he collected 300 pounds of matsutake mushrooms one day a few years back. “They filled up the back our minivan,” he said. “I canned them all, I had 300 pints of matsutake.
” He said those pints made great gifts for his Japanese friends. “In Japan, if you give somebody a gift of an average size matsutake mushroom, and you want to present it in a really nice box with some fresh moss, it will cost about $100,” he said. In addition to chanterelle, morel and matsutake mushrooms, Sommer said he also enjoys collecting porcini mushrooms, which are currently in season.
“Three of us picked about 15 of them, today, in Breckenridge,” Sommer said on Thursday. For more information, check out “Foraging Mushrooms of the Rocky Mountains,” the Colorado Mycological Society’s field guide (which also contains recipes) at the Bookworm in the Riverwalk at Edwards..
