Our first mission is for mushrooms. There are more mushrooms, Horatio, than… | By Christelle Rivers, Ph.D. | Roaring rivers | October 2025

There are more mushrooms, Horatio, than you ever dreamed of

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Roaring rivers

Christelle Rivers, Ph.D. Gives it the ability to handle today’s torrents, ripples and currents

Make room for the shrooms

Two of our friends are gourmet chefs. Someone came to the Seattle area to visit and showed us how to forage for edible mushrooms.

Among our small group of four hunters, we made a lot of jokes about poisoning ourselves. But we identified, and quadrupled, the five boleti mushrooms that we eventually took home.

We’ve seen a lot of poisonous pigeons. Paul – I’ll call him Paul – pointed out several species of spotted Amanita. He also told us not to bother with any mushrooms that have gills. Not all of them are poisons, but it’s better safe than sorry.

We also had to be aware of leaving behind much more than was taken in, so we only took enough to get a few small bites.

It rained (thank God!) just a few days ago. It was a fantastically beautiful day, yesterday. The ground was just right for all the little lumps, bumps and stumps. Once we actually started looking for bedrooms, I was amazed to find that there were hundreds of them, in different colors and sizes…