Curious by Nature
Jayme Castro’s Foraging Tours in Mount Shasta…
Jayme Castro has spent more than two decades studying fungi in the Mount Shasta area. “I’ve been studying mushrooms for 23 years. When I got into it, it was pretty much an underground thing.” But these days, that underground interest has surfaced in a very public way. Castro recently founded the Mount Shasta Mycological Society, a group of mushroom enthusiasts born of Castro’s desire to get people outside. So far, it’s already drawing lots of local enthusiasm. “The first outing I put together, I just invited the public to grab their baskets, come out and look for mushrooms together. That was my way of gauging the interest in local mushroom hunting. We had 30 to 40 people show up, which I found wonderfully surprising,” recalls Castro.
For Castro, popularity isn’t the point. Education is. He also asserts that mushrooms are about far more than what’s edible. “The first question is always, ‘Can I eat it?’ This is an important question, but what I really like to do is turn people on to just how amazing mushrooms are because of what they’re doing in the environment.” Castro speaks with reverence about what’s truly happening under our feet. “Trees really depend on mushroom partnerships because the mushroom mycelium is essentially spoon-feeding them, and, in exchange, the trees are providing sugars to the mycelium. It’s just beautiful symbiotic relationship where everything is connected. Without that relationship, we don’t have forest ecosystems, which means we don’t exist.” From mycorrhizal fungi to parasites like cordyceps, Castro also delights in the strange complexity of the fungal world. “What’s going on in the world of fungus and mushrooms is so fascinating—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Part of Castro’s teaching also involves undoing long-held fears. “For a lot of American history, mushrooms have been tied to fear,” Castro said, referencing what he calls “fungi-phobia.” He recalls a moment in childhood that still resonates. “I was picking mushrooms in my yard, and when my mom saw me, she slapped them out of my hands and told me to go wash them immediately, along with the warning to never touch toadstools again.” Castro says that instead of deterring him, the admonishment only further sparked his curiosity. “There was something about that fear and mystery that made me want to look closer.”
Castro mostly grew up in Mount Shasta, arriving in 1990 at the age of 6, and the surrounding forests became his classroom. “This is where I first got obsessed,” he says with a laugh. “I was always drawn toward the mushrooms. I spent thousands of hours in the woods wandering, collecting mushrooms, bringing them home, doing spore prints and having multiple mushroom books to cross-reference.” Sometimes that also meant tracking down the only local expert Castro had access to in town. “I didn’t have his phone number so I would just wander around town until I found him.”
As mushroom foraging grows ever more popular, Castro urges foragers to always keep safety at the forefront. “There’s no quick method or test to tell edible mushrooms from poisonous ones. It comes down to recognizing anatomy and characteristics, so it’s best to learn the dangerous groups first, especially Amanitas, which are the deadliest,” says Castro. This year has made his message especially urgent. “This has been the most explosive mushroom season I’ve seen in my life,” Castro says. “We got a lot of moisture and no heavy freezes. And with more mushrooms and more people foraging, California has seen an alarming spike in poisonings from misidentification, with 40 cases of death cap poisoning so far this year, compared to the usual three to five,” he notes. “Unfortunately, a lot of those poisonings were from misidentification.”
Castro also likes to tackle common myths head-on. “People will show up wearing rubber gloves because they’re afraid of getting poisoned, but there is no mushroom that will poison you just from touching it,” says Castro. He also notes, perhaps surprisingly, that some identification methods involve tasting. “You can actually nibble a death cap, but you just have to spit it out. To become poisoned by it, you have to consume a fair amount of the mushroom.”
While some foragers might be tempted to keep good harvesting spots a secret, Castro remains generous with his knowledge. “I’m not greedy,” he says, noting that his goal goes beyond simply finding mushrooms for himself. “When we’re on a tour, I hope that a light goes off in people’s heads with the realization that everything’s connected. And, if mushrooms are the entry point, all the better. I want people to fall in love with nature so that they’ll want to help protect the habitats that support mushrooms.” And, in the forests around Mount Shasta, Castro sees endless possibility. “There’s so much to be discovered in the world of mushrooms. All you really need is curiosity.”•
www.shastaforage.com
