Mushroom Obsession

Our 2025 national spring foraging tour occurred May 2 through May 28, our sixth consecutive such trip. Please enjoy this report on how it went.

We launched the tour on May 2 when I picked up my son-in-law, Michael Teeter, from the SeaTac airport and we proceeded east. Our first night was spent in the wilderness of northeastern Oregon’s Umatilla National Forest, near a prescribed burn which we hunted for any signs of the elusive morel.

It’s All About … the Coffee?

In our first night’s camping spot near Spring Creek we filmed the beginnings of a “coffee in the wilderness” segment for Mike’s YouTube coffee show, I Travel 4 Coffee. This was followed by the filming of three other segments as we traveled east, the first in Jackson Hole, Wyoming (where we also hunted for morels along the Snake River), the second in Omaha, Nebraska, and the third in Cincinnati, Ohio.

A worker at our first Harvest Hosts stay, Still Works in Jackson, Wyoming, provided us with helpful information about where to hunt for local morels. But unfortunately I think we were too late.

The Tetons are always one of my favorite sights, and this panoramic gives you a sense of the awe and majesty of these mountains.

It’s All About … the Music?

I left Mike working on his show in Cincinnati and picked up a friend from our church at home. We drove south through Kentucky (visiting the world’s largest wooden structure on our way toward Nashville, a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark).

That is one big boat. This life-sized replica of Noah’s Ark in the forests of Kentucky is the largest wooden structure on earth. They also gave my friend Nathan, who is blind, a very cool “tactile tour.”

In Nashville we toured Grune’s Guitars, the world’s foremost vintage guitar store. (I picked up some accoutrements for my favorite guitar, a Taylor, and salivated over a Martin 12-string.)

This is one of the first Martin guitars ever built, and it is over 140 years old. It lives behind this glass case at Grune’s.

From there we headed a bit further south to Franklin, Tennessee, considered the epicenter of the Christian music world. We spent two nights with a good friend from my college days, John and his wife Michelle, and participated in a “writer’s roundtable” they organized at a local coffeeshop featuring some top-notch emerging Christian artists.

But the final goal for this portion of our trip was a “bucket-list” item for my friend Nathan, who is our church’s deacon of worship and plays bass on my worship team there. We are each customers of Sweetwater Music in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and were treated to a royal three-hour tour of that amazing facility by our amazing rep, Shaka Dhladhla.

Several thousand employees at Sweetwater can enjoy this special slide as one of their perks.

Next stop was Columbus, Ohio, where I left Nathan in the care of some good friends while I continued east to pick up my wife at the international airport in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She and I then continued east a few hours further through a heavy storm until we finally reached our daughter’s home in Osterburg, Pennsylvania.

Really, It’s All About … Friends and Family!

We spent a week hanging out with our daughter, her husband Mike (yup, the coffee guy) and our granddaughter Annabelle. Our foraging in Pennsylvania yielded a nice crop of wild Reishi mushrooms growing on a dead Hemlock tree, and also a goodly quantity of wood nettles. I made about a gallon of tea out of each find, which lasted me most of the way home.

Reishi mushrooms on dead Hemlock.

And Finally … It’s All About the Mushrooms!

To this point I hadn’t yet hit the jackpot with morels. I enjoyed my travels, especially camping in national forests and staying at unique Harvest Host locations, such as the Lincoln Way Winery in Wooster, Ohio (my first night’s stay after dropping my wife back at the Pittsburgh Airport for her plane ride home) and the Farmhouse Provision Store in Gould Michigan the next night. But everywhere I went it seemed like I was a week or two too late to hit the morels, which some said had been profuse.

Camping next to an old barn behind the “Farmhouse General Provision Store” near the shore of Lake Michigan. The store owner told me where I could have found morels … a week earlier.

At a coffee shop on the shores of Lake Michigan (near Escanaba) things finally came to a head. I was working on my laptop, researching possible local foray areas, when two elderly women took the table next to me. My ears perked up when I heard the word “morels” in their conversation, and I couldn’t help but eavesdrop.

Woman 1: “Yes, the morels were fantastic this year! I found gallons on my property. Too bad they’re all gone now.”

Woman 2: “My son brought me a 5-gallon bucket of those morels. But I don’t trust mushrooms that don’t come from a grocery store, so I threw them all out.”

I almost cried. I wanted to walk over and slap her silly. But I managed to restrain myself.

One of my frustrations on this trip was the general unavailability of national park rangers who are normally a good source of information. No one ever answered the phone. One gentleman did return my call … two days after I’d left the area. I visited several ranger stations in person, during business hours, only to find them closed and locked up tight. I fear that the current political climate of mass layoffs is having a detrimental effect on our national parks, in a manner that was very palpable and painful to me during my travels. (Imagine how painful it must be to our rangers!)

But even as I was striking out with morels, I was scoring with other forage finds. For instance, I’ve never seen so many ramps (a sort of a cross between wild garlic and shallots) and also ostrich fern fiddleheads (very tasty) in all my life.

When I reached western Montana, I left myself some extra time to make one last morel-hunting attempt. I mapped out a 2024 burn area in the Bitteroot Mountains, left Radagast (my trailer) in a safe spot at the foot of the mountain and ascended a very dicey forest service road in search of the burn area. When I found it, it looked perfect for morels … except that it was bone dry, and scouring the area yielded not a single sign of mushrooms of any kind.

I ascended further up the forest service road in hopes of finding a stream, but soon found my route blocked by a trail closure. After hunting the area there, again unsuccessfully, I was ready to give up and head for home.

As I was climbing back into my truck, a couple came down the closed trail on foot. They were carrying a 5-gallon bucket of morels. I engaged them in conversation and shared that I hadn’t found any where I had been hunting.

The woman’s name was Jenn, and she was very helpful. “Oh, you are about a thousand feet too low. You need to hike up this trail about three miles beyond this closure and a thousand feet higher, before you start finding them.

At this point I was heartbroken because I was out of time. But as Jenn and I chatted about Fall mushrooms in the Puget Sound, she began to get excited. “I have to confess,” she told me, “I’m mushroom-obsessed!”

This seemed an appropriate point to pull one of my “Mushroom Obsession” coffee mugs out of my car and I handed it to her. She squealed in delight and couldn’t believe I was giving it to her. “Consider it my business card, as it has my URL on it,” I shared. “It’s yours to keep. I hope you can join us in a Fall foray on Mt. Rainier sometime.”

“What can I give you in return?” she asked. “Would you accept some morels?”

That had to be one of the dumbest questions in the universe.

So she very kindly set me up with a paper bag full of my favorite mushrooms, and I didn’t return empty-handed.

I spent my final night of travel with friends from church who now live in a wooded pasture north of Spokane, and that was a delight. The drive home the next day was less of a delight (some genius in Washington’s Department of Transportation decided that Memorial Day would be a good time to schedule road construction on highway 90), but I finally arrived tired but happy. My wife and I had our precious morels with the best steak we could find, and it was amazing!

Will there be a seventh national spring tour, I’ve been asked? If so, I’ve decided to schedule lots of extra time for serendipitous foraging adventures.