Girdwood Mushroom Expert Co-Authors Alaska Guide Book

‘Mushrooms of Alaska’ To Be Published This Month

"Mushrooms of Alaska" authors, left to right, Noah Siegel, Kate Mohatt, and Steve Trudell outside Girdwood's community hall after the Fungus Fair. Girdwood Mushroom Expert and Co-Author will have a book signing at Mother Hubbard's (next door to Jack Sprat) in Girdwood on Wednesday, Oct. 15, from 5:00—7:00 p.m. (Photos by Soren Wuerth)

By Soren Wuerth

TNews Editor

The humble mushroom crouches on a tuft of neon green lichen, its purple cap resplendent in a shard of light cutting through the forest. 

Along comes a stampede of teenagers, rushing, pushing and jostling. Then, one sees it. 

"Look!" says a girl with a top hat over black bangs. She squats to meet the humble mushroom eye level.

"Don't touch it," her friend warns. "It might be poisonous."

A quick text and photo to an amateur mycologist reveals its title: Russula emitica, "The Sickener". And another fact: "No mushrooms are poisonous to the touch."

The girl opens a journal to sketch the Russula. 

"Is it edible?" a friend asks.

What kind of mushrooms are these? Find out from Girdwood Mushroom Expert and Co-Author Kate Mohatt during a talk, "The Making of an Alaskan Mushroom Book", on Wednesday, October 8, from 5:30—8:00 p.m. in the Ann Stevens Room on the third floor of the Loussac Library in Anchorage. Additionally, she will have a book signing at Mother Hubbard's (next door to Jack Sprat) in Girdwood on Wednesday, Oct. 15, from 5:00—7:00 p.m.

"Well. It is called 'The Sickener'."

A few days later, she's on the trail with a mushroom book. 

The young naturalist's fascination reflects what conservationist Rachel Carson wrote 70 years ago—a "sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years."

When a sense of wonder took hold of local fungi expert and author Kate Mohatt 30 years ago, as she collected mushrooms near her home in rural Wyoming, it didn't let up.

Mohatt began collecting mushrooms when she was 15. She didn't care to eat them. In fact, she thought they tasted "disgusting".

Mushrooms were mysterious because she couldn't identify them. Then again, she would soon learn no one else could identify them. Her field guide didn't cover her Wyoming countryside. A sense of wonder was activated.

"It was just, what are all these things and why doesn't anybody know anything about them? I just kind of got obsessed," Mohatt said. "I think that's a common story. I mean, when mushrooms are fruiting, when you see a bunch of them out, it's really eye-catching and you want to know what the hell they are." 

It wasn't until her sophomore year in college when Mohatt finally found a senior-level course devoted to her sense of wonder, mycology. She enrolled immediately.

Her obsession and academic study would lead Mohatt to organize 17 local Fungus Fairs and to coauthor a guidebook, "Mushrooms of Alaska", planned for release later this month. 

The 572-page field guide has a color-coded reference of more than 400 mushrooms, each showing features to make identification easier. 

In this state, though several other regional guidebooks have been penned, "Mushrooms of Alaska" is "maybe the only one worth having," said Mohatt.

Mohatt co-authored the book with Noah Siegel, who has co-authored other books on mushrooms and is considered one of North America's leading experts, and Dr. Steve Trudell, author of "Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest".

Mohatt said each author brought a different expertise to the book. For her part, it was her knowledge of Alaska and of the mushrooms people are seeing because, while Trudell and Siegel would only visit the state for a week or two, Mohatt, who works as an ecologist for the Forest Service, is here year-round. 

Trudell has written several field guides and has a relationship with the publisher, Timber Press. He has a "gift for the tedious" as a careful writer and editor. "You're not going to find a typo in that book," Mohatt said.

Siegel has "the most up-to-date knowledge" of mushrooms and took many of the photos for the field guide. "It can take anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours to set up a good photo," Mohatt said. "It's involved.

"You're seeing (mushrooms that are) old, young and in-between," she said. "You're getting the cap, the stems, the gills or whatever the underside is. He's cutting it in half. He's showing you any color changes within the stems. You're getting a ton of information in one photo."  

Talking over the phone once a week, for a duration of years, the authors had to determine which species would be included in the book. The book contains only around 20 percent of mushrooms in Alaska. 

"Because this is a field guide, not a reference guide, we can't include all species nor would we even have the material or time or funding to include everything," Mohatt said. "But we wanted to ensure that we had a broad range of all the different genera, a good representation of the major ones and certainly the edibles and the weird things that might not be so common but that people find and really wonder about."

Mohatt self-funded a home laboratory in Girdwood to "sequence" or extract DNA from more than 300 species she found in the old-growth rainforests around Girdwood.

And, since "some species don't fruit every year you couldn't do this in a year," Mohatt said. 

"If you said, 'this year my goal is to photograph every mushroom in the State of Alaska,' you'd fail spectacularly."

A mushroom is the "fruit" of a fungus that grows in the soil. Its "roots" or "mycelium" branch in a symbiotic relationship with trees. Climate change and development that eradicates forests have impacts on fungi. 

"Far and away habitat loss is the biggest threat," Trudell said. 

Mohatt said that, locally, mushroom seasons have shifted.

"Fungus Fair used to be the last week in August, and it would reliably be the end of mushroom season. Now, here we are in almost mid-September, and mushroom seasons kind of just got going. And we've had that for several years," she said.

Amateur and professional mycologists bring samples of species they find in local forests to the Fungus Fair to be displayed on a table. This year, the count was 121 kinds of mushrooms. The most collected, in 2018, was 225 species.

Trudell said interest in wild mushrooms is increasing if the popularity of his book is an indicator.

"I'm pretty sure of all the field guides (the publishing company) has done to date, my Northwest book is the biggest seller (and) it's the only one that's gone to a second edition," Trudell said.

But while interest in mushrooms is increasing, he said, "understanding and doing something about it isn't."

Mushroom enthusiasts have been growing mushrooms for food and for their psychoactive properties. Some cities and states have passed measures legalizing psilocybin, or "magic mushrooms". 

Paul Stamets, a mycologist and entrepreneur, founded a company advocating "medicinal fungi" and bred what Mohatt calls a "cult-like following".

Trudell says Stamets believes "magic mushrooms" have a higher consciousness because they have induced humans to spread them across the planet.

In Girdwood, a Fungus Fair talk years ago on the hallucinogenic properties of mushrooms motivated perhaps the biggest audience in the fair's history, Mohatt said.

The popularity with fungi has, well, mushroomed beyond interest in psychoactive properties. "Chaga", a conk used to make tea, has become common on some cafe menus. 

Then there is "kombucha", which is a tea made from a symbiotic growth of bacteria and yeast and its "scoby" is often confused for being a type of mushroom. 

But there is more to mushrooms than what they can do for you when you ingest them, Trudell said.

"Most people get interested in mushrooms initially because you can eat them. And I tell them there's nothing wrong with that, but if that's all you're interested in, you're missing so much," Trudell said. 

When he's out on walks, he'll inspire others to wonder, "how many hundreds of different fungi are living down there? What are they doing? How are they interacting with each other? How are they interacting with the trees? How are they interacting with the mites and the spring tales?"

"I mean, there's such fascinating organisms," Trudell said. "(There is) one species that has somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 to 30,000 different sexes. We don't call them sexes, but mating types. We're fricken human beings, we got two. How boring is that?"

Mushrooms like these are abundant throughout Girdwood.

Turnagain News caught up with Mohatt days after Girdwood's Fungus Fair. She was joined at Girdwood Brewing by Trudell. (Neither mycologist drank the kombucha.)

(Questions and answers are excerpts from a two hour interview with Kate Mohatt and Steve Trudell and have been edited for clarity.) 

TNews: You have a lot of personal photos in the book, including pictures of your dogs (on page 10) .

Mohatt: They were there. Giving me the stink eye. Getting me to hurry up. "Take my photos and move on."

TNews: So, are they still around? 

Mohatt: Story died last year. Penny's in the car right now. 

TNews: Did they eat mushrooms?

Mohatt: No. Well, Story did when she was a puppy and I was really nervous because we got her in October around the time—15 years ago—there was galerina (also called "funeral bell") all over in the wood chips in the yard, and growing next to lactaria (Lion's Mane), she did eat a mushroom. I was like, "Oh, shit." But luckily, it was lactaria. 

TNews: Do dogs die from eating mushrooms?

Mohatt: A dog died a week or two ago up near Denali from eating mushrooms—a really common species. 

TNews: How did you find out about that? Are you in a network of mushroom toxicologists? 

Mohatt: Well, the Poison Control Center has my cell phone number and I get probably two to four calls a week from across the state. (For example,) my toddler ate this mushroom... That's most of (the calls). And, in most cases, the toddler didn't eat the mushroom. But they treated them as though they did.

TNews:  You (authors) dedicated your book to Virginia Well and Phyllis Kempton, who, as you wrote, didn't eat mushrooms. But most people gravitate to mushrooms for consumption. 

Mohatt: It's kind of common for mycologists to not be that into eating them. It's maybe a 50-50 split. Well, like birders aren't necessarily into eating birds. It's along the same lines. 

It's always baffling to mycologists why people are just fixated on edibles when there's such a ridiculous diversity of mushrooms. But, I mean, I get it. 

What most people know about mushrooms is you buy them at the store and you put them in your pasta dish or whatever. So (coauthors) Steven and Noah both don't eat mushrooms. I never liked eating them until I was older and discovered there's some wild mushrooms that are pretty dang palatable and not slimy. But as a kid, I thought they were disgusting. 

TNews: Do you kind of see yourself kind of in Wells' and Kempton's story as well. (Wells and Kempton, to whom "Mushrooms of Alaska" is dedicated, were pioneers in the identification, classification and recording of mushrooms in Alaska. Both have passed on.)

Mohatt: Steve (Trudell) really identified with her, and so did I. Of course, I had more resources than she did... But still, I encountered the same barrier in that a lot of field guides don't cover where you are. You really need a region specific field guide, and those didn't exist in the '90s. "Mushrooms of North America, or "Mushrooms in the United States"... they are just too broad. And you very easily get swallowed up. Especially if you just don't know anything or where to start. 

A lot of those older field guys were written by academic-level mycologists and they were writing it from the standpoint of how they're taxonomically related, not necessarily how they phenologically looked—which oftentimes are linked, but not always. And so things would be in alphabetical order, for example. 

...The way we did this field guide was geared towards someone who doesn't know the taxonomy and familial relations. It's organized not by how they're related, but how they look. 

TNews:  I understand Noah (Siegel, co-author) has a fascinating background.

Mohatt: He doesn't even have a high school degree. He grew up totally feral on a farm in rural Massachusetts. And he's now one of the world's premier fungal taxonomists. He goes all over the world. ... And he's like a world expert from rural Massachusetts. 

TNews: How did he elevate to that status? 

Mohatt: He's so good at it. He has a photographic memory. (He used) the same field guide I struggled with when I was young trying to identify mushrooms (Gary Lincoff's go-to-reference book "Field Guide to North American Mushrooms")

And he had every page of that field guide memorized. You could play a game with him: Pull out that book, flip to a random page, read the first three words, and he'll tell you what mushroom it's describing. He's truly, truly gifted. 

TNews: Is Girdwood kind of unique or that we're a good community to identify and search and find mushrooms relative to other places?

Trudell: Any place in the Northwest where you've got good intact forest, is going to be a good place. Again, certainly (there is) a lot of year to year variation, but in a good year, there's a lot of mushrooms here. And, you know, I don't think Kate makes people sign in when they turn off the highway to come here. But certainly there's a lot more people coming from other places now to Girdwood than there used to be. 

TNews: Have either of you ever gotten sick from eating mushrooms? 

Mohatt: Yes. 

TNews: Really? 

Mohatt: Morels. There are toxins in them. You just have to cook them really well. I will only eat one if I cook it myself and I've cooked it for at least 45 minutes. 

It's not worth it. And even then I'll eat just a few. Nobody knows what compounds are causing the problem. 

Three people died from eating undercooked morels in Montana two years ago. Two were from a sushi restaurant. I think (the mushrooms) were raw.

Trudell: Morels are without a doubt, the most widely consumed edible mushroom in North America, because in the middle part of the country, that's the only mushroom most people will eat. They get them, bread them, and fry them. 

The North American Mycological Association has a form you can fill out if you get sick from the stuff. Unfortunately, the database is pretty small, but in some years, morels are the leading (cause of poisoning). Certain people just can't tolerate them at all. If they're not cooked well enough, they're gonna have issues. 

TNews: So what is your favorite mushroom? 

Mohatt: For me, it's Hygrophorus saxatilis. 

It's not very common, certainly not common in Alaska. There was one observation of it this year. "AK Woodworker" (an iNaturalist pseudonym) found it. 

It's this bright white, gorgeous, waxy mushroom, that fruits from just one place I've seen in Girdwood. And it's supposed to have a peach or anise odor, but this one smells like Simple Green, the cleaning solution.

Trudell: I never have a favorite anything. 

TNews: Favorite mushroom to eat. If you had to. 

Trudell: Candy cap. Because they make desserts from it.

TNews: That's actually the name of it?

Mohatt: Smell in my car. It smells like a maple doughnut. That's what I use as an air freshener.

Trudell: When I first got interested in mushrooms in Santa Barbara, we'd find them and put a few of them on the heater and then, you know. They get used mostly in cookies 

Mohatt: Oregon White Truffle. Best tasting mushroom on the planet. 

If you want to get into the nuance of it, you don't actually eat the thing, you infuse fats with them. That's where all the flavor is. Get them if you're lucky, pack them in a tupperware with soft boiled eggs, cheeses, butter, pack it all in there, and let them stew for four days.

Trudell: You can do it with rice, too. There's not a whole lot of fat.

Mohatt: Flavored rice? Then you'd have flavored rice.

Truffled rice? I'll have to try that.

Mohatt will hold a talk, "The Making of an Alaskan Mushroom Book", on Wednesday, October 8, from 5:30—8:00 p.m. in the Ann Stevens Room on the third floor of the Loussac Library in Anchorage.

She will have a book signing at Mother Hubbard's (next door to Jack Sprat) in Girdwood on Wednesday, Oct. 15, from 5:00—7:00 p.m.