Fungi boom caps off B.C. wildfire season
Multimillion-dollar mushroom industry counts on forest fires
The trees roll by the open window, stark and black against the sky like an endless barcode.
“This fire is like an ocean,” Tyler Knip says, “and we’re hunting little schools of mushrooms.”
Knip checks the satellite map again as the car bounces along the forestry road inside last summer’s Elephant Hill wildfire, near 70 Mile House in the B.C. interior. He’s looking for strips of green against the blackened landscape, prime territory for morel mushrooms.
Last summer, B.C. was ravaged by the worst wildfire season on record. More than 1.2 million hectares of forest burned. The Elephant Hill fire, stretching nearly 200,000 hectares, was one of the largest.
In the aftermath of those fires, where most people see devastation, mushroom pickers like Knip see dollar signs.
Morel mushroom harvesting is a multimillion-dollar industry that thrives on forest fires, which produce bumper crops of the cone-shaped mushrooms. Every spring, following a summer’s worth of wildfires, a small army of harvesters takes to the mountains in search of the lucrative fungi.
Freshly picked morels are going for between $6 and $7 per pound this spring. In a single day, professional harvesters can bring in anywhere from $200 to $500.
They’re sold out of the backs of beat-up 4x4s to buyers like Benjamin Patarin and Celia Auclair, morel picking veterans themselves, who now run Wild West Foragers.
The mushrooms are destined for markets around the globe. One Richmond-based retailer sells dried morels online — $90 for a four-ounce bag.
According to Patarin, the Elephant Hill fire alone will probably generate somewhere around $1.2 million in payments to pickers over the course of the season.
The whole of B.C. represents a potential harvest in the tens of millions of dollars, assuming there are enough harvesters to pick them all. But that isn’t likely, Patarin said.
This season, he estimates there are about 1,500 professional pickers working in B.C., who will likely harvest about a third of all the available morels.
The industry has, for decades, been totally unregulated — the money paid out in cash, largely under the table and, in many cases, to commercial pickers from outside of Canada who try to fly under the government’s radar.
Competition can fuel irrational behaviour, Auclair said. Pickers sometimes start fighting among themselves.
In one case she recalled, rival buyers tried to burn down each other’s tents. The RCMP had to be called. “They call it ‘the zoo,’ ” she said, of these gold-rushstyle mega-camps.
Another problem with the lack of regulation is collusion among mushroom buyers, Auclair said. She and Patarin try to treat their pickers better by being more transparent about pricing.
It seems to work. At Auclair’s camp on the Chasm forestry road near 70 Mile House, about two dozen pickers live in relative harmony with clean, wellappointed tent sites, sometimes sharing meals around the campfire.
“We try to be more profes- sional, more sustainable,” she said.
There’s also the question of whose land this bounty comes from, considering that British Columbia is almost entirely unceded Indigenous territory.
After last year’s unprecedented wildfires, the combined bands of both the Ts ilhqot’in and Secwépemc Nations started planning for permitting programs aimed at taming the wild mushroom industry and asserting their traditional rights and title to the land.
Chief Ryan Day of the Bonaparte Indian Band, which is part of the Secwépemc Nation, said the communities were also looking for ways to replenish the ravaged land.
“We have decades of recovery because the land is fragile right now,” Day explained. “This land is scorched.”
They knew, he said, that wildfires usually brought out a wave of mushroom pickers — known for leaving behind a mess and causing safety issues because there is currently no provincial regulations over the harvest. So the agreement to take over stewardship of the land was a strategic move to get ahead of a potential problem, Day said.
Shelby Lacie is the director of the Secwépemc Nation’s permitting program. He said since it launched in May, they have issued about 200 permits for pickers and buyers in the Elephant Hill fire.
In exchange for $50, pickers get permits that cover harvesting and camping in designated areas, with fresh water delivery and portable toilets. They also get an orientation package that includes a map of the burn area and the location of camps and buying stations. Buyers pay $500 for a designated location that is advertised on a map given out to every picker. “There’s a lot of support for the pickers,” Lacie said. “If someone goes missing, everyone stops work to help look for them.”
It’s late afternoon back at the Chasm camp, and the pickers are starting to return with their hauls. Knip and his partner Katie Johnson are from Ontario, and this is their first season on the hunt. Like many morel harvesters, both are experienced tree planters who have spent years working and living in bush camps.
Even so, the learning curve for them is steep. While other teams of experienced pickers are hauling upwards of 120 pounds of mushrooms from the bush in a day, Knip and Johnson are happy to score 30 or 40 pounds.
“With tree planting, you’re working to a different metronome,” Knip says as be cracks a beer. “You’re trying to do it as fast as you can. You almost develop a neurosis about it.”
Morel picking is different, he says, because you can’t be as mindless. You have to be constantly reading the terrain, evaluating where the most fertile ground might be for the earthy morsels to sprout.
“I didn’t find very many morels today but I found a beer in this cooler, so it’s still a good day. We’re still learning,” he says with a laugh.