November 25, 2025: Chanterelle etiquette -

We went chanterelle hunting with a friend of Rick's yesterday. I'd never met him before, but Rick had told me that he usually wore a MAGA hat, and - unlike some of you - I have no one in my current crew who does, so I was a tad nervous. Rick also said he (the friend, let's call him Dean) had a good heart under a gruff exterior, and that had to be true, because in the hunter-gatherer subculture, taking someone to your chanterelle spot is an act of supreme generosity. 

I was determined to show my gratitude by being a good sport and not a woke liberal elitist snob, and I jumped out of our truck the minute we saw Dean, and ran over to shake his hand. He must have dressed up for me, too, because his hat was plain brown, no decoration. Good omen, and off we went, and the day went without a hitch except for that one outhouse incident where we set off. 

(Please note both messages, including the one in red. No signal. The guys waited patiently for me for a while.)

You may not know that sharing a favorite mushrooming spot is a big deal, which is why I'm bringing you up to speed. If I give you some chanterelles I picked, and you ask, "Where did you get them?" I can tell you exactly where -- but only if I found them without anyone's help.   

If, on the other hand, Dean takes me to his place, and I offer you chanterelles I found there, and you ask me where we went, I must answer in the vaguest terms. "In the Coast Range, off a logging road." Not much help.

Keeping a place secret, or semi-secret, makes sense, because "the commercial guys," aka the folks who pick chanterelles for market, will wipe a bed clean, and tie plastic ribbons to the trees so they can come back next year and wipe it again. Therefore, it is also good etiquette, in a friend's favorite spot*, to take down all the ribbons you see. I brought home a pocketful.

Commercial guys are necessary, of course, if you want to buy chanterelles in the store. And we do that! But commercial guys are not good for those who like to find chanterelles in the woods, which we also do! 

In a way, the ribbons are excessive. For one thing, chanterelles are very easy to spot, being more or less the color of a fancy cheese puff - not Cheetos, but a toned-down, hippie-brand alternate version of Cheetos. And they have distinctive gills that go down into the stem.

                                                                                 Gill shot!

                                                   Yellow, but not even remotely a chanterelle. This mushroom is doing everything it can to dissuade you from eating it! 

And for another thing, outdoorsy types now have fancy GPS apps on their phones, and they can map the exact trail they walked from anywhere to anywhere else, and drop a little pin, or 26 little pins, at exciting way points, and save the map. 

Dean, in fact, had just persuaded Rick to get the fancy GPS app, and was talking it up. He said, "We lose a couple of mushroom hunters every year. They get turned around, trying to get back to their rig, and they head off to where the nearest road is fifteen miles away. And that's it."

I thanked him for doing what he could to keep Rick safe, and he said it was just one redneck helping another. (He enjoyed that.) Then he added that it was a Republican taking care of a Democrat! He also urged Rick to map how we reached his favorite spots, so we could come back without him. Again, a generous move. 

And then he began talking darkly about this OTHER guy he had taken mushroom hunting a few years ago, and how THAT guy had just blatantly turned on HIS tracking app the minute they got in the truck! 

Complicated, right? The other guy was supposed to ASK if he could turn on his tracking app. I said, "Wow, that was so rude!"  Dean said yeah, the guy was rude. But he was dead now.

This was a non sequitur! Guy didn't die lost in the woods, nor did he die because he was so rude, Dean bumped him off. But still, the timing of "He's dead now" was excellent. 

Also excellent, my little Health tracker awarded me 147 flights of stairs for our day in the woods. This is, I'm sorry to say, incorrect. But I'm not going to go in there and change it. 

*I know that Dean's favorite spot doesn't belong to Dean. It might, technically, belong to the Bureau of Land Management, or to Weyerhauser, or to whoever bought Boise Cascade's timberlands decades ago, or to any number of other organizations, but probably not to the folks from whom the rest of us stole the whole continent. Which could bring us to Thanksgiving etiquette, but nope, I'm not going dark today! Some of our very favorite people won't be with us this year. They didn't get lost in the woods, and they weren't rude, but they're still gone, and we'll miss them.