The Mushroom Rush To Hungry Horse

Bad Forest Fires Last Year Draw a Throng
to a Town In Mountains of Montana
By Lauren Etter and Janet Adamy
The Wall Street Journal
June 23, 2004

HUNGRY HORSE, Mont. -- Word spread last winter that spring would bring riches to the Whitefish Range slopes around here. That brought prospectors from around the country to Hungry Horse. Last month, almost overnight, a city of tents sprang up in the wilderness outside town.

These prospectors are gathering morels, a mushroom prized by restaurants and gourmets. The morel hunters are here because fires around Hungry Horse last summer consumed more than 240,000 acres of land. It's axiomatic among morel hunters that a forest fire one year means a bountiful harvest the next.

When he loaded his family into a beat-up white Chevy van and drove here in May from his home in Randle, Wash., Hassan Voir figured he'd be earning as much as $800 a day. A Cambodian native, Mr. Voir has become a professional picker of wild mushrooms -- matsutakes in September, chanterelles in January. When hunting morels, Mr. Voir travels in the path of wildfires, which his brother tracks for him on the Internet.

Mr. Voir has also learned that picking is just one way to earn money in this business. Another is buying. Structured markets don't exist for wild crops. But markets emerge wherever these products are found. Here, crude white tents with signs that read "mushroom buyer" have sprung up on the dusty washboard road that winds north to the Canadian border. One of those tents belongs to Mr. Voir.

The 38-year-old Mr. Voir rises before dawn each morning and strikes out to pick, carrying along an empty pickle bucket and walking as many as five miles, looking for burned logs, riverbanks and other spots where morels thrive. When he returns 10 hours later, he opens his buying tent and starts his second job. Nearby, his wife and three young children live in a rugged tent with a blue tarp spread out before it like a front porch. Mrs. Voir warms her infant son Jamal's milk over a fire.

Like Mr. Voir, many of the morel prospectors are Cambodian. At night, they gather around low tables made of plywood and cinder blocks, where they eat noodles with fish sauce, gamble and drink shots of whiskey as disco music plays on a karaoke machine.

The prospectors have nearly doubled the Hungry Horse population of 934, presenting a challenge to law-enforcement officers. Besides tensions between locals and newcomers, there are occasional clashes between pickers enraged at perceived invasions of turf. Last year, in a different town, Mr. Voir says, a man threatened him at gunpoint for allegedly encroaching on his mushroom-picking territory. Stepping away from his buying station one day recently, Mr. Voir returned to find that a thief had nabbed four baskets -- 60 pounds -- of his morels, costing Mr. Voir more than $200. He reported the theft to the sheriff, but nothing came of it.

Park rangers, under their "Mushroom Action Plan," are on the lookout for firearms. "They can be plum dangerous," citizen patrol officer Lee Downs says of the pickers. Another issue is picking morels in Glacier National Park, nine miles northeast of here, where gathering is forbidden. That carries a potential $5,000 fine, vehicle seizure and up to six months in jail. Glacier National Park rangers have issued four citations this year for illegal commercial harvesting.

This year's healthy supply means that morel pickers aren't getting the premium prices of past seasons for their harvest. Pickers here are selling a pound of fresh morels for about $3.50, which is low, they say. Wholesalers are selling fresh morels for as little as $8 a pound, not quite half last year's going price.

But the price can change as fast as the weather. When buyers spot gray clouds, morel prices inch up because buyers want to get their hands on batches without the "ash-splash" that rain kicks up from the burnt ground. On the other hand, the per-pound price drops when water-logged morels hit the market, because buyers don't want to pay for water weight.

Cooks love morels, which have a spongelike appearance, because of their nutty taste and extraordinary ability to soak up sauces. A pound of morels sells for as much as $40 at fancy food stores like Dean & DeLuca in New York.

Hauling the mushrooms away from Hungry Horse are distributors like Casey Jonquil of Alpine Forager's Exchange in Portland, Ore. Mr. Jonquil arrives in a big truck, and his contractors buy up mushrooms from local buyers like Mr. Voir. Mr. Jonquil then drives 11 hours back to Portland carrying as much as 3,000 pounds of morels.

Mr. Jonquil packs the mushrooms in cardboard boxes and ships them overnight to restaurants and wholesalers. The wide availability and low price of morels mean that many restaurants are increasing their orders this year and others are indulging in the delicacy for the first time. "It's amazing," says Tom Condron, executive chef at Upstream Mimosa Grill in Charlotte, N.C., who has elevated his morel side dish to an appetizer. "The gods are definitely looking out for us this year."

The lower prices haven't deterred Mr. Voir, who is willing to risk income stability for the freedom that comes with picking morels for a living. "Nobody controls me," Mr. Voir says. "I have no boss."