After a Yukon fire come the pricey, prized morels By Lawrence Millman May 7, 2006 - boston.com
DAWSON, Yukon -- As poet Robert Service famously remarked, the Yukon's midnight sun has seen some pretty strange sights.
The bard of the Yukon wrote of a cold prospector named Sam McGee who decided to have himself cremated, that being the only way he could think of to get warm. A hundred years later, you can walk into a bar in Dawson, the epicenter of the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush, and order a Sourtoe Cocktail, so named because it has a pickled human toe in it.
Then there is the spectacle of soot-blackened people clutching baskets and wandering about local forest burn sites. In a way, these people are prospectors, too, but they are trying to find fungal gold: morel mushrooms.
In a good year, a pound of dried morels is worth $100 or more on the European market. A pasta dish in a five-star French restaurant achieves epicurean glory only when the chef graces it with a few of these prized mushrooms -- rehydrated, of course.
That transcendent pasta may owe its flavor, at least in part, to global warming. As a result of unprecedented hot, dry weather in recent years, wildfires have raged across the Yukon.
While the fires wreak havoc, they also create conditions conducive to morel production. The reason for this is not clear. Something about fire-related nutrients or disruptions in the soil inspires the morel's vegetative portion, or mycelium, to send up biblical numbers of fruiting bodies.
The last big forest fire year was 1996, and a stampede of mushroom pickers came to the Yukon the following summer. Many left with bulges in their billfolds. Last summer, in the wake of more massive blazes, buying depots appeared on the Klondike Highway outside Dawson and on backcountry mining roads, with signs advertising ''Top $ for Mushrooms." Pickers began dropping by these depots with baskets of their bounty. Before you saw them, you could smell a pungent amalgam of burnt forest, sweat, and bug dope.
Some had tales of woe -- a Global Positioning System gone awry, a transmission wrecked by a particularly primitive stretch of road, a burn site that had mosquitoes rather than morels. But many of the pickers did quite well. Buyers paid $6 a pound for ''wet" (fresh) specimens, and at a depot near Dawson, a soot-covered man with a ponytail pocketed $910, not bad for eight hours of picking. Asked where he found his mushrooms, the man jokingly responded, ''No Tell'um Creek."
Such caginess is not surprising. Just as in the Gold Rush days, when no miner would reveal the site of his claim, so a morel picker tends to regard everyone as a potential raider of his burn site. This isn't simply paranoia. Most of the 2004 fires occurred on crown land, public land in Canada, and every man, woman, and child is a potential raider.
And just like during the Gold Rush, no one seems to use their real names. If you hang around the buying depots, sooner or later you run into the likes of Ivan the Terrible, Klondike Mike, Nancy the Pig, Bugeye Bob, and Captain Carl. There's a very good explanation for at least some of these nicknames. As a remarkably disheveled picker who calls himself Grizzly Spasms put it: ''Outlaws never give their real names."
Most of the pickers are seemingly law-abiding men and women from around Dawson. Even so, a number of vehicles with British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and even Quebec plates rattle around local roads -- or get stuck in local rivers. A picker from Alaska got a flat as he was driving across the White River, whereupon he had to jack up his car and change the tire while standing in 2 feet of ice-cold water.
One picker who wasn't rattling around local roads was a lanky fortyish man named Doug. Doug has a car, but he decided to leave it at home ''because you lose more than you gain by pounding . . . your car on these blasted roads," he said. He hitchhiked to the Yukon from Squamish, a town north of Vancouver, and when his last ride dropped him off, he had $1.80 in his pocket. Four days later, he was up almost $2,000. ''Boom or bust, this is a modern Gold Rush, no doubt about it," he declared.
Camped in a lonely spot off North Fork Road, he didn't seem to mind company. It was 11 p.m., a relatively mosquito-free time to search for mushrooms (the midnight sun providing all the necessary light). Doug pulled out a government-produced map of the burn sites and pointed to an area on the Stewart Plateau at least 4 miles from his camp. ''A picker who's willing to walk is the one who finds the most," he said.
At the edge of the burn there was a jumble of downed trees, brambles, and underbrush. Using an ax, Doug hacked his way through the more difficult sections. In the easier spots, the only morels seemed to be ''cheerios" -- in picker's parlance, the hollow stems that indicate a fellow forager had been there first.
''The morel prefers the southeast or southwest parts of a well-drained slope," Doug said. ''Also, you're not going to find any unless there's some tree canopy overhead." Shortly after uttering these words, he exclaimed: ''Look! There's a nice blonde!" He was referring to a light-colored morel rising from the blackened ground. A few inches away was another blonde. Then another. And another. Doug seemed to have entered a beatific state as he cut off each mushroom at the stem and placed it in his basket.
Ultimately, Doug made $597 from his 10 1/2-hour excursion into the backcountry. Two days earlier, the same trip would have netted him $900, but the price had dropped to $4 a pound. A shipment of morels from Asia had hit the European market, causing the global price to plummet.
Doug agreed that he could probably make more money if he dried his morels and trucked them to Vancouver himself. But then he would have had to invest in a dryer, not to mention a truck.
''Right now I'm dancing to my own tune," he said. ''I can set my own schedule, go to sleep or wake up when I want, pick when I want. I even have running water . . . in that creek down there. To tell you the truth, I'd rather make less money and be happy than be rolling in it and have ulcers."
The region has experienced a relatively high number of forest fires since last summer, so Doug and his fellow pickers will probably be back this summer, poring over maps and tramping the crown lands in their quest for this year's Yukon gold.
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