Photo by Emily Moskal
Before the Annual Fungus Fair, It’s All About Finding the Right Mushroom
Bay Nature, December 2013
Amidst the relict frontier homes and horse-drawn carriages of a Saturday afternoon in Woodside, it was easy to spot the ground-watchers I’d come to find. Heads down, baskets under their arms, they paced slowly across the hillside adjacent to the street, happily oblivious to the surrounding clatter of horse hoofs.
I parked at the side of the road and wandered up a hill just in time to catch Chris Schoenstein stepping down from a ladder leaned against the burl of an ancient oak, holding aloft an unusual prize: a lion’s mane mushroom (Hericium erinaceus), its bouncing white tentacles flowed over his hand. “What a primo beauty!” Schoenstein said.
