John Burridge

 Our yard has been invaded by mushrooms.  I don't know what kind of mushroom this is, although I'm pretty sure last year our neighbor had three or more rings of these growing in her yard -- so maybe they're related. 

Mushrooms have been springing up all over the neighborhood, I'm guessing because of the really heavy rains we got a week ago.
 Autumn is officially here.  I have managed to catch a cold from The Child's school.
The fuchsia at the side of the house survived the summer and the benign neglect that we heap upon it. 

Over the weekend we went to Larison Creek to hunt for mushrooms.  There weren't so many this time; either we were too late for them, or the weather had been too dry or too cold.  The creek bed is part of a large reservoir, and the slopes above the creek's banks are terraced by previous higher levels.










The most obvious mushrooms were the shelf mushrooms growing on the sides of trees.  Slightly less obvious, but ubiquitous once you started to look for them were some teeny-tiny ones growing out of moss-covered logs. 



At the parking lot there was a dead dear carcass.  Something about the empty eye sockets made it look oracular from its position between the worlds.  If we had been in a Grimm fairytale, we would have nailed the head to a gate and asked it questions--but it was old and gross and the rest of the family wouldn't entertain the thought of dead deer bits in the car.








The more coral-like ones remind me of Sheri S Tepper's novel, Raising the Stones. 






 These were growing about eight feet up on a tree.



Near our turn-around point, we came upon a kind of cascade of mushrooms.












This was my first mushroom hike with the new camera, and I'm still running into situations where the focal length and the zoom confuse the auto-focus of the images.  The flip-screen does make it easier to get at difficult angles without having to lie in mud or damp forest litter.

Yesterday we went on a hike east of Oakridge to search for mushrooms.  The sky was clear and the sun was out, although it felt like it set early in the valley we were in.  Sunlight liberated steam from the saturated ground.  Usually mushrooms are all over the place, but this time we only saw them in ones and twos.  Mark was very happy when we found a purple mushroom, which he took a picture of.

I've been busy.

Here, last week we went on a mushroom hike.  Have some photos:

 Mushrooms were thick along the path.
 We called these "Ghost Chanterelles."
We called these "Hedgehog Mushrooms."








We didn't eat any of these.  Mark did find some real chanterelles, and we cooked them up with rice and ate them.  And lived.