It’s been raining on and off all night, and the mountains are misty as thirteen people gather in Jonesville to begin the hike. This is prime weather for mushrooms, says Laura Young, with the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation. She helped plan this mushroom hike, which is led by Adam Boring, from Big Stone Gap.
Boring explains that some mushroom are poisonous, and it’s best not to pick them unless you know what you’re doing, or are accompanied by a trained expert. There are guided mushroom hikes, like this one, where people can learn.
“I love coming out here,” says Elizabeth Cooperstein, one of those on the mushroom hike. “It’s something that takes my brain in a different direction than my day-to-day life.”
Cooperstein is a doctor in her day job. She’s partly retired and spends some of her free time volunteering with Friends of the Cedars, which organized this mushroom hike.
This land, which used to be overrun by cedar trees, is called the Cedars Natural Area Preserve. Most people call it The Cedars.
Laura Young manages this forest, and part of her job is doing prescribed burns.
“So this is actually only a couple of months after a fire, and you can see how there’s already vegetation that’s knee to waist high up here, there’s mushrooms coming up everywhere,” says Young, who works for, and says mushrooms thrive after a fire. Other native plants do too.
As we head into the forest, Cooperstein describes what it was like here before they began doing prescribed burns.
“It was very much overgrown with underbrush,” says Cooperstein. “As you can see, there’s a lot of dead brush here, this part has been burned. And then the part on the other side of the trail has not been burned.”
We begin to see all kinds of mushrooms of various shapes and colors. One hiker, Aaron Mazuelos points out a shimmering clear one called a jelly fungus.
There are seniors and several small children on this slowly meandering hike. Young says, it’s not so much about burning calories as slowing down, and looking at what’s growing.
“You know, you get to see it in person, and there’s a lot of value in that,” Young says
Boring explains, mushrooms grow underground, so the part we see is just a piece of what’s growing beneath our feet.
“Nope, not hurting the mushroom if you pick it,” Boring says. “The mushroom itself is the fruiting body, so think of it kind of like the apple on the apple tree.”
Boring is a mental health therapist in his day job. But he’s spent the past several years learning how to correctly identify mushrooms. He shows us one bright blue mushroom, called an indigo milkcap.
Wearing a wide-brimmed hat, and using a walking stick, Ronnie Branham says this is the first time he’s been at the Cedars. He lives in nearby Dickenson County.
“I’m a hiker, so I hit the trails just about everywhere,” Branham says. “But I’ve been mushroom huntin’ before, now. But I don’t know a lot about them, so I’m trying to learn.”
Teaching people what’s in the forest is part of why this group organizes events like this, explains Cooperstein.
“A lot of people spend time in the outdoors, cause they hunt or they farm or whatever. But one of the things we like to do is to see more of the perspective of what the benefit of having a wild place is,” says Cooperstein says.
They also host butterfly walks, and salamander hikes. Events that help show how prescribed burning, and other restoration efforts, are helping bring more plants and animals back to this forest.
There are several events this fall that offer guided mushroom hikes.
- Fairy Stone State Park is hosting a hike on Aug. 25 at 5:00 p.m. in Patrick County
- Three mushroom clubs are hosting a 3-day mushroom conference, with onsite camping in Rockbridge County Sept. 6-8
- At the High Knob Naturalist Rally in Norton, Adam Boring is leading a mushroom walk on Sept. 28, hosted by the Clinch Coalition
