Big Ridge, Tennessee
April 8-10, 2011
The 18th annual George Lanz morel foray at Big Ridge State Park featured warm spring
sunshine, some strenuous hiking, and a pretty good haul of morels. It may be age or
imagination, but the Tennessee hills seem to be getting steeper!
Spring was early this year, and so were the morels, but there were still plenty left for
the 27 people who took part (26 AMC Members and Sam Landes from the Georgia
Mushroom Club). George Lanz and Whitey Hitchcock led us on three forays between
Friday afternoon and Sunday morning. We found 571 morels on Friday and then stopped
counting, but the grand total must have been over 1000 – about twice as many as in
2009. As usual, black morels predominated but yellows, Deliciosas (also called greys or
whites), and half-frees also turned up.
On Friday evening, Charlotte Caplan reprised her presentation of the “Top 50
Mushrooms of North Carolina” (actually 51, but who’s counting?), using the club’s
newly-acquired multimedia projector. Most of the audience seemed to stay awake.
On Saturday night we had a splendid potluck dinner. As usual, George’s superb pizza
disappeared faster than the eye could follow.
Morels
• Black morel
• Deliciosa morel
• Half-free morel
• Yellow morel
(The use of common names rather than scientific names is deliberate – most of the
scientific names we have been using for Morchella taxa belong to European species
which have been shown by DNA analysis to be different from the American species,
but new scientific names for our morels have yet to be developed. For a frank and
entertaining discussion of the current taxonomic muddle, see: Kuo, M. (2008, November).
Identifying morels with morphology. Retrieved from the MushroomExpert.Com Web site: http://www.mushroomexpert.com/mdcp/kuo_08.html
Other Fungi
• Entoloma vernum (Early Spring Entoloma)
• Peziza badioconfusa (Common Brown Cup)
• Polyporus mori (Hexagonal-pored polypore)
• Polyporus squamosus (Dryad’s saddle)
• Urnula craterium (Devil’s Urn) – very widespread this year.
Photographs by Rob Russell
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