(calming music)
(birds chirping)
- Here we are on the top of Mount lemon.
And any day that,
even if we weren't to find one single mushroom,
anytime you've spent a day in the woods you've already won.
(car engine roars)
My name is Julia Bishop Beautie
and I was a reporter for 25 years down here at the border.
And now my major passion is mushrooming.
I've joined a group and we hold mushroom growing classes
and we have mushroom hunts
and look for mushroom treasure, right,
which is what we're doing here today.
What if I open it, it's still brown all the way through.
- Exactly.
It's just incredible you're out here in the forest,
and you suddenly seen bright oranges,
bright reds, blues, whites, purples, any color,
bright yellow.
So it's something really amazing
and the fact that it only pops up
at a short time of the year,
and disappears again, it's just a really magical thing
to be the person that captured it
in that small time that it was there.
- My name is Nyles Bauer,
and I run the Mushroom Club here in Tucson.
We're in Mount Lemmon in Tucson Arizona,
because this is probably the densest mushroom population
after the monsoons of any place in the world,
or of any known place in the world.
Because we have the monsoons
and because the monsoons are finite and fairly short,
the mushrooms have to emerge during the monsoon
or soon afterwards.
(wind blowing) (serene music)
(moves into upbeat tempo music)
- Hi, my name is Denver and I'm a mushroom hunter.
I just really have a hobby and enjoyment
to come out here into the mountains during the rainy season
and find all the delicious medicinal edible mushrooms
that I can.
I would say,
solidly I've been doing it for about four to five years
and it started as chance as I got a book for Christmas,
that was a mushroom ID guide.
So it kind of started there.
But really the passion was ignited
when I came up here to Mount Lemmon
and found Ganoderma conks,
big beautiful red mushrooms growing on the trees.
And I just really started a passion for me to come up here
and see what else I could find year after year.
Any time you say that word mushroom,
all's you hear people talk,
oh, trippy mushrooms this and that.
But it's really a sad state of affairs,
because most Americans, most Westerners,
don't have a relationship with mushrooms
and whereas most other countries do,
most any other countries, they really love mushroom hunting,
they love gourmet mushrooms.
And America unfortunately,
we only know of two or three varieties really
when there's thousands and thousands of varieties
that could be being enjoyed,
you just got to get out there and find them,
start cultivating them.
So over here you see some nice polypores.
Not positive on the idea of them,
probably not hard to figure out what they are,
but these are very common up here on Mount Lemmon.
You'll find them all over the place
from probably 6,500 feet on up.
- This is the shaggy mane mushroom.
It's a choice, edible mushroom.
And one of the nice things about it
is it doesn't have a lot of look-alikes.
So when you're going along, you can find it,
you can identify it,
and you know you found mushroom treasure.
Because it's delicious, your day has just paid off.
- One of the best known and safest of all wild mushrooms.
The flavor is very delicate, but the texture is marvelous.
Not slimy as an okra but succulent as an octopus.
- I actually don't like eating mushrooms (chuckles)
but I'm just fascinated
by the legitimate science behind him.
My background is in engineering,
but I've never pursued that.
I always went for my passion, I guess.
Mushrooms are essential to a forest.
They're essential to any eco-system itself.
If you look over there,
you can see mushrooms growing on the side of this dead log.
What they're doing is recycling the nutrients
from the tree itself back into the system,
so you can get uptake into living organisms.
Plants, animals,
fungi itself, gets reused and recycled by fungi.
Without that, this whole system would just break down.
Everything would just fall apart.
- I don't think we choose who we fall in love with, right?
And I didn't really choose to fall in love with mushrooms.
They appeared, it happened.
I fell in love and then,
after that I can identify logical reasons what like,
such as they have incredibly huge medicinal properties
or they have chemical warfare between each other
and make little chemicals.
Or they support all life on the planet, right?
So I can use all these logical reasons,
but basically I just fell in love.
- It just really depends what mushrooms you're looking for.
Some mushrooms, you're gonna be looking up in the trees,
some mushrooms, you're gonna be looking on the ground,
some of you're gonna be looking on stumps.
So if you know what you're looking for
you know specific areas to check.
I personally am looking for anything and everything,
so I'm looking everywhere (chuckles).
- There's something about being outside
and being engaged in nature.
And this allows you to do it without any effort.
If you've got a passion for plants,
and you go out into nature to identify plants,
or to look for plants, or go birding,
or you're engaged in it and there's no effort,
and the same goes for mushroom collecting and mushroom ID.
- I could study them for the rest of my life
and not learn everything there is to know about mushrooms.
They continually surprise and delight me.