![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/mushroomjar.jpg.jpg?ssl=1\" "\\"mushroomjar.jpg\\"")
<\/a>A few dried mushrooms and my favorite book.<\/p><\/div>\n
I remember my father the forest ranger taking me out when I was ten or eleven to look for them. It was usually raining, and I did not understand what he was seeing, but the activity was somehow important.<\/em> And we ate them.<\/p>\n Then nothing until I was in my mid-twenties, when M. and I went hiking on the west side of Pike’s Peak (Horsethief Park, if you know the area) one late-summer day.<\/p>\n There we met a number of middle-aged and older German ladies wandering the forest with shopping bags.<\/p>\n They re-initiated me \u2014 and initiated her.<\/p>\n It’s like another German “grandmother story<\/a>.”<\/p>\n (Demographic note: Colorado Springs is a major military garrison town, and troops at Fort Carson<\/a> frequently go back and forth to Germany, which they have been doing since 1945. Sometimes they get married.)<\/p>\n For a time we got by with what the German ladies taught us. Then we wanted to learn more. But we had moved to a much smaller town, and there were no mycological groups there.<\/p>\n Then we moved again, into an area known for bears and mushrooms. In fact, the Pikes’s Peak Mycological Society<\/a> frequently organized “forays<\/a>” (an in-group term, kind of like “sabbat”) into this area.<\/p>\n Dad, a member, bought us a membership too. But that was a drought year, and all forays were canceled. Then he died, and my stepmother died, which pretty much ended our regular trips to Colorado Springs.<\/p>\n We started buying books. Yep, we’re book-taught mushroomers. Every time we go out (we don’t say “foray”), we try to learn a new one\u2014and meanwhile we stick to the half-dozen that we know are good.<\/p>\n Like the Sarcodon imbricatus<\/em> (hawk’s wing) in the jar. I figured those out from a book.<\/p>\n Two days ago we hit one of our favorite spots, and right off spotted where someone had sliced some Boletus edulis<\/em> at the base. Everyone goes for king boletes! But they had left pounds and pounds of hawk’s wing mushrooms while they focused on boletes. (We still found some boletes ourselves anyway.)<\/p>\n It’s OK being solitary mushroom-hunters with a few good books and an inquiring (but careful) attitude.<\/p>\n I just wish that Dad was here to share them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I come from a hereditary tradition \u2014 of mushroom hunters. I remember my father the forest ranger taking me out when I was ten or eleven to look for them. It was usually raining, and I did not understand what he was seeing, but the activity was somehow important. And we ate them. Then nothing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-4530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-mushrooms"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1b4","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2564,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2564","url_meta":{"origin":4530,"position":0},"title":"Occultism and Mushrooms","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 17, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Not necessarily psychotropic mushrooms. To learn more about them, read Andy Letcher's Shroom or the works of Paul Stamets, Dale Pendell, etc. These are metaphorical mushrooms\u2014or mushrooms as metaphor\u2014from an article by Wouter Hanegraaff on the German scholar of esotericism Will-Erich Peuckert (1895-1969): To me, [Peuckert's] book [Pansophie] breathed\u00a0 an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"occultism\"","block_context":{"text":"occultism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=occultism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":490,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=490","url_meta":{"origin":4530,"position":1},"title":"Local Knowledge","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 17, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Three cheers for Vera Stucky Evenson, author of The Mushrooms of Colorado. Those white mushrooms were indeed Agaricus campestris. M. and I ate them on last night's pizza, and we're still here 24 hours later. (Yes, I made spore prints too.) The cat ate some too--he must have liked the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"deep ecology\"","block_context":{"text":"deep ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=deep-ecology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10758,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10758","url_meta":{"origin":4530,"position":2},"title":"Getting Lost among the Mushrooms","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 7, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"There are at least five stages to mushroom-hunting. You walk in the woods but do not see the mushrooms. You begin to see mushrooms here and there. Your unconscious is seeing mushrooms. For example, every reddish-tan thing on the forest floor that approximates the cap of a bolete will jump\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"animism\"","block_context":{"text":"animism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=animism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/bolete-fb.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/bolete-fb.jpeg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/bolete-fb.jpeg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/bolete-fb.jpeg?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":4927,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4927","url_meta":{"origin":4530,"position":3},"title":"The Basic Split in Pagan Witchcraft","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 1, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"As I posted earlier, the issue of The Pomegranate now in press has an article about Robert Cochrane, one of the first English witches to use the term \"traditional\" in opposition to Gerald Gardner's Wicca, back in the 1960s. In fact, my own current researches are going to force me\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"England\"","block_context":{"text":"England","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=england"},"img":{"alt_text":"Issue 2 of the British newsletter Pentagram, November 1964, price 2s, \"for private circulation only.\"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/Pentagram2.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7368,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7368","url_meta":{"origin":4530,"position":4},"title":"Lammas, Wild Harvest, and “the Notch”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 1, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Many of the Pagan bloggers are putting up their \"Happy Lammas\/Lughnasad\" posts. My archaeoastronomical friends who study mysterious ancient solar alignments point out that \"real\" Lammas is still six days away. But there is \"the notch.\" In 1986, when I moved to this part of Colorado, a friend told me,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"nibbled bolete","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/nibbled-bolete.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/nibbled-bolete.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/nibbled-bolete.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":13446,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13446","url_meta":{"origin":4530,"position":5},"title":"A Knife in the Woods","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 11, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"M. and I went yesterday to check our favorite mushroom grounds. The radar had shown thunderstorms up there earlier in the week , but whatever rain fell had soaked right in. Nothing was coming up yet, not even LBMs. ((The mushroom hunter's catch-all term: \"Little brown mushrooms.\" Like \"little gray\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"Large butcher knife on forest floor.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/found-knife-768x441.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/found-knife-768x441.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/found-knife-768x441.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4530"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4544,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530\/revisions\/4544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}