The morning starts with a brisk hike. Club President Kevin Perez-Norwood leads the pack, and everyone's eyes are peeled for concealed fungi. Perez-Norwood explains the differences between edible mushrooms and their poisonous counterparts, while also demonstrating proper, sustainable techniques for foraging mushrooms.

The group stumbles upon one hidden among tufts of grass, crouching to get a better look at the specimen. Perez-Norwood parts the strands, gently prodding his knife around the fungi to loosen the dirt. The mushroom is the right size, prime for picking.

"We don't really harvest the really young mushrooms, unless we're desperate to find something," says Toshiro Wada, a second year Cal Poly student.

With that, Perez-Norwood gingerly pulls out the mushroom, head and stem intact. "Leave no trace," Perez-Norwood intones, as he covers up the hole he created by harvesting.

After getting their fill of fungi, the group moves on to their next destination on their foraging journey. The goal is to collect a few species of mushrooms—both edible and poisonous—to display at the SLO Museum of Art's event, The Possibilities of Mushrooms. One of the group's stops is the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve, where they observe what's growing because it's illegal to pick mushrooms on the property.

Signs placed along the preserve's trails warn pedestrians that foraging is prohibited, but that hasn't stopped people from hauling away wild oyster mushrooms, morels, and porcinis. Posts on the Cambria Currents Facebook group call out the mushroom poachers, who often take "bags and bags of mushrooms."

But the damage doesn't stop with what poachers take with them—it's also what they leave behind. Kitty Connolly, executive director of Friends of the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve, explained over the phone that when foragers stray away from established trails to search for mushrooms, they can damage newly emerged seedlings and the part of fungi that grows below the surface.

"That's part of the reason that picking is illegal, collecting is illegal on the ranch," Connolly said. "It's because we're trying to support the ecosystem, local ecosystem, and you do that by not removing the resources."

Foraging has burst into the limelight in the past three years, a phenomenon that Perez-Norwood calls the "shroom boom." Increased public interest means that the existing natural resources on the preserve can't continue to sustain the growing number of amateur foragers.

Connolly explained that even if each forager only takes 10 percent of the mushroom population, it eventually depletes the resources.

"Pretty soon you have 0.005 percent left of what that resource was, because there was a time before Europeans came to California when the whole state had a million people, and you could survive on foraging. But now your high school has a million people," Connolly said.

Just because a mushroom has been picked doesn't mean it's gone forever. Fourth year Cal Poly student Joey Hammond explained to New Times via phone that mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of mycelium, an underground network of fungal threads that typically sprout mushrooms after a bout of rain.

"You won't kill a species by picking mushrooms. You will cause ecosystem damage if you're going around in areas that are, like, let's say off trails and pushing through a lot of wilderness and things like that," Hammond said. "But taking a lot of mushrooms, at least for an individual person, to my knowledge doesn't cause ecosystem damage."

Connolly explained that enforcing the "no foraging" rule has been especially difficult, due to it being a nonviolent crime, and the lack of a Cambria law enforcement agency. Instead, the ranch relies on visitors to "watch out for the ranch and its resources."

"Irresponsible foragers don't care about the rules. And they just take things if they want them, so it's a real challenge to get people to want to behave ethically," Connolly said.

But not all foragers are irresponsible. One way Hammond practices sustainable foraging is by avoiding smaller, underdeveloped mushrooms.

"Foraging is a very etiquette-based hobby because it's very easy for someone to run through and destroy stuff or just kind of ruin the conditions for other people," Hammond said.

And California isn't necessarily set up to be forager friendly. Foraging is prohibited on most state-owned public lands, with the exception of Salt Point State Park. The same goes for foraging on private land, which is why Hammond uses an app called OnX Hunt, which shows land ownership.

"I really like finding new areas. I like looking at a map, looking at where the different forests of SLO are, looking at public access land, it's almost like a treasure hunt. You get out there, and half the time you're entirely wrong about something," Hammond said. "Maybe you're looking out for an hour and worst case scenario is you're somewhere you haven't been before; best case scenario, you find something."

It can take up to a week for mushrooms to sprout after a storm, but overzealous foragers can quickly decimate that fresh crop, leaving none for hungry animals or other foragers. If practiced correctly, Perez-Norwood believes foraging can be more sustainable than getting groceries from the store.

"I think the main problem with foraging and a lot of these unsustainable practices are because people just aren't informed of what's right," Perez-Norwood says. "They don't think that they're doing anything wrong for the most part."

That's why Perez-Norwood takes members of the mycology club on foraging trips, where he teaches beginners how to forage without damaging the environment.

On another stop of their foraging journey, club members gather around a large cluster of bright orange mushrooms as they watch Perez-Norwood carefully inspect the fungi's characteristics.

To the untrained eye, a poisonous mushroom could look identical to its edible counterpart. There are a variety of litmus tests that mushroom hunters can perform to identify a poisonous mushroom.

One method of identification is using potassium hydroxide, which can prompt color change in a mushroom. Hammond, who is colorblind, uses other methods of identification to distinguish between fungi.

"Color is only part of the equation," Hammond said. "With the mushrooms there's more minute details and emotions, like the way that the caps are shaped, the way that the gills are shaped, attached to the stipe."

While foragers have different philosophies on the hobby, Perez-Norwood believes that commercialization of the hobby contributes to the problems ailing the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve.

"Foraging at its very core is connecting back to nature. I think if you're a mindful, intentional forger, I think you're more likely to protect nature," Perez-Norwood says. "I think when you go into foraging just for the money, that isn't a question to get spend as much as possible. Like damn anything else. It's just kind of like you're missing the point of it." Δ

Reach Staff Writer Shwetha Sundarrajan at [email protected].