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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Looking like the result of a romantic encounter between a sponge and a deflated balloon, morel mushrooms are as elusive as they are rewarding, with the power to draw hunters from a thousand miles away.

Craig Scott holds up part of this year's morel harvest. The highly-prized fungi is worth a bit less than gold, and is almost as difficult to find. - Jack Danylchuk/NNSL photo

Like gold, morels are where you find them, and the most likely place is where they were last found. That's not a riddle, and it's no accident that the most successful prospector in recent Yukon history, Shawn Ryan, is a former mushroom hunter who turned his skill at reading maps to finding gold.

Those without the map savvy to predict the whereabouts of productive morel ground can look where a forest fire has burned away ground cover and leaf litter that work with the mushroom's natural camouflage to make it almost invisible.

Burn zones are magnets for mushroom hunters like Craig Scott and Bruce Green, a retired Hay River school teacher, who has resisted the occasional urge to sell his valuable finds to brokers who whisk them off to eager connoisseurs around the world.

Scott, a partner in Arctic Harvest, a new Yellowknife company dedicated to gathering and marketing the wild flavours of the North, chartered a plane in July to reach a burn site 50 km out of Lutselk'e.

A forest fire swept over the area last year and after the first summer rains, the ground was spotted with the dark brown fungi; two men managed to collect just more than 100 pounds of morels that, when dried, weighed 15 pounds - worth about $2,800.

"It's a good product, definitely free of any contamination, but with the cost of the flight we'll just break even," said Scott, who is already anticipating next year.

Fires burned across the highway south of Hay River and south of Behchoko, making for easy access to the morels.

Areas subject to land claims are off limits without permission from First Nations groups, but the ground is open to everyone everywhere else, said Tom Lakusta, the GNWT forest resources manager in Hay River. There is no limit on the harvest, or fee licence required.

Green remembers the Sandy Lake fire of 2009 that attracted interest from across Canada. Harvesters ranged across the burn like foraging bears, focused on gathering as much of the bounty for themselves as possible.

"Few words were exchanged, and certainly no useful information," said Green.

A search for career mushroom harvesters through MoNa, an Edmonton wild food broker, aroused immediate suspicion in Michael, the manager and receptionist who refused to provide his last name, who holds pickers in low esteem.

"If they can get a real job they probably would. It's seasonal. It's not a sustainable year-to-year economy that will keep people at it. Economic gains probably don't exist. My contacts from yesterday may not be available today."

Green is looking to next July and the potential windfall from the fires. He has thought about selling his harvest, but he also likes them for his own table. "It's a nice thing to have in a sauce," he said, "and they can be dried and used for years."

There are other mushrooms with commercial potential; Pine mushrooms, the almond-scented matsutake for which Japanese gourmets will pay almost any price. Green thought he was into a fortune when he discovered what looked like a lode of white matsutake, "but they proved to be a less desirable close ally."

Real matsutake don't appear until after the first frost, said Scott, who is currently busy harvesting the product of the August rains: birch boletes, hawkswing and hedgehogs.

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