{"id":372,"date":"2007-03-03T23:01:14","date_gmt":"2007-03-04T06:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/?p=372"},"modified":"2007-03-03T23:01:14","modified_gmt":"2007-03-04T06:01:14","slug":"shroom-hunting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/?p=372","title":{"rendered":"Shroom Hunting"},"content":{"rendered":"

It rained a lot last week, sheets and sheets of rain. But this morning, glorious sunshine. On top of Maisie’s Peak<\/a>, out of breath after a week off and with an arm stretching towards San Francisco, downtown was as tall as a cuticle, my fingernail on the horizon. But I could see it! Amazing early spring air, damp with pungent Bay Laurel and lichen and moss.<\/p>\n

Jerry met us at breakfast and decided that a post-rain Saturday was prime for mushroom hunting, so we drove up the hill to an alpine lake along skyline Ridge<\/a>, ditched the canoe (whim #2) and went off the beaten path with the kidlets. <\/p>\n

\"mushroom4.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Chas surprised me with his reaction to a Banana slug. He was pretty offended, wouldn’t touch it at first. This blew me away; I think these things are the coolest molluscs around, like a cold slice of mango looking back at you. <\/p>\n

\"banana.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We found a rough-skinned newt<\/a>, too, that was hard to photograph in the deep shade of a thick, ancient redwook .It crept with fat, orange and humanlike fingers across our hands, drunkenlike yet determined to get back into the detritus. So I returned him to the ground before we exhausted the little guy, and he indeed honed immediately into a random opening in the lattice of wet pine and laurel litter. <\/p>\n

We bypassed fallen trees, macerated by rain and time and recently, bear paws. Fresh fiddleleafs, little forest babies, unfurling and mushrooms everywhere. Fruiting above a mycelium beneath an oak tree, wrinkled black Elephant<\/del> correction: “Elfin”<\/em><\/del> saddles. Little brown mushrooms, maroon unbrellas, fluorescent capes and fans of turkey feathers. Matte black puffs, like ashballs, and salmon candylike clusters on rotting bark. In the split of a tree, neon orange jelly fungus. <\/p>\n

\"mushroom2.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"mushroom1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"mushroom3.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It rained a lot last week, sheets and sheets of rain. But this morning, glorious sunshine. On top of Maisie’s Peak, out of breath after a week off and with an arm stretching towards San Francisco, downtown was as tall as a cuticle, my fingernail on the horizon. But I could see it! Amazing early […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exploring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}