Hunters waited at the Ryerson’s Woods trailhead in Iowa City on a beautiful late April Saturday morning. Older men with walking sticks wore blaze orange caps. University students in shorts and sneakers chatted among themselves. A handful of middle-aged women and a few retired folks rounded out the group. I joined them with my notebook and camera.
There wasn’t a gun in sight. These were mushroom hunters, ready to head off on a Prairie States Mushroom Club foray.
It was one of many offered by PSMC this season. Club president Sarah DeLong-Duhon is evangelical about Iowa’s fungal wonders, and the thrill of chasing them.
“Mushrooming can be like a treasure hunt,” she said. “We want to open people’s eyes to fungi, so they will love and appreciate mushrooms — and just be amazed!”
Guided by mycologists and mushroom experts (the members in the bright orange caps), all of us in the group, from noobs to experienced mushroomers, hoped to spot some treasure. We’d heard that someone foraged an entire pickup-truckload of morels here last year. Paper bags were handed around for our finds, and we set off on our hunt.
The group headed out into the woods, quickly abandoning the trail. Walking slowly through the leaf litter, we pushed our way past spiny gooseberry plants, chokecherry saplings and flowering mayapples.
Mushroom forays led by the PSMC, like this one, have surged in popularity in the past year, with outings scheduled all over Iowa during the spring and summer months. (Upcoming forays, most of which are open to the public, are listed on the organization’s website).
Since the beginning of her presidency, DeLong-Duhon, who did independent research on fungi phylogenetics as an undergrad and again as a Master’s student at the University of Iowa, has been busy making the organization more visible and expanding its outreach. PSMC got a big boost last November when DeLong-Duhon gave a presentation at an Iowa Association of Naturalists Workshop.
“People from every corner of the state got to hear about the Prairie States Mushroom Club and what we did,” DeLong-Duhon said. “Since then, we’ve gotten many emails from different Iowa counties requesting forays.”
Membership in PSMC has jumped from around 20 people to over 100.
The Prairie States Mushroom Club has a history going back more than 40 years. Founded in 1983 with the goal of promoting scientific and educational activities related to fungi, it welcomes both professional biologists and hobbyists alike. Forays like the one I joined are the perfect way to get people excited about all things fungal.
“Where’s the best kind of place to look for mushrooms?” I asked as DeLong-Duhon and I made our way up a steep slope.
“The woods, mostly,” she replied. “That’s where you can find the environments they like.”
DeLong-Duhon explained that mushrooms grow in different places depending on what they use for food. Some fungi spawn on dead organic material like dead leaves or stumps. Others grow on living plants, either in a symbiotic or parasitic relationship.
Mushrooms themselves are just the fleshy fruit of a fungus, not the entire fungus. If you’ve turned over rotting leaves to find a fine web of white fibers and a mushroomy smell, you’ve seen the main body of a fungus. This is the mycelium that does the work of digesting organic material by injecting enzymes into it. The enzymes break down the material so that the fungus can absorb it as food.
Yes, those fungi are eating the dead leaves, the dead tree, the elm roots. And they’re contributing to the ecosystem as they do so, decomposing dead material and collaborating with many tree and plant species in a delicate, symbiotic dance.
As fruit, mushrooms are part of the fungi reproductive cycle. They come in a bizarre variety of shapes and colors, from the familiar spongy morels to bright golden oysters to phallic stinkhorns, branching coral mushrooms, and vomit-like slime mold. There are even some fungi that appear on violet leaves as bright yellow spots, or on cherry branches as black carbuncles.
Maybe it’s their weirdness that makes them so fascinating to us.
Ahead on the Ryerson’s Woods slope, we found a few of our group clustered around a dead tree. It was the first find of the day: a colony of inky cap mushrooms on the ground near a stump. These mushrooms had thin stems and deep brown caps that were turning black at the edges.
Everyone took turns coming up close for a look.
In another hiker’s palm was a slightly fluted mushroom: golden brown on top, creamy underneath with architectural-looking pores. It was a hexagonal pored polypore.
“Can you eat them?” someone asked.
Our experts tell us that the hexagonal-pored polypores can be eaten when young; otherwise, they’re too tough. With inky caps, you have to cook and eat them quickly before the mushrooms deliquesce into a pile of goo.
DeLong-Duhon points out that mushroom edibility runs on a spectrum. Some mushrooms are choice edibles; truffles, oyster mushrooms and morels are some of the more well-known ones. Others can be eaten, but aren’t tasty. And of course, there are the poisonous ones.
Everyone who hunts mushrooms for food wants to make sure they don’t get poisoned. Having experts to turn to in these matters is important. No one in the PSMC has died from eating wild mushrooms, although a few adventurous eaters, the ones willing to take a risk, have had some unpleasant digestive experiences.
DeLong-Duhon herself admitted to getting sick from eating mushrooms. She’d heard that green-spored parasols, white mushrooms with caps the size of dessert plates, could be eaten after 20 minutes of cooking at a specific temperature. They’re normally considered poisonous.
“Apparently I didn’t cook them enough,” she laughed. “It was a real fun time with GI distress. My body was trying to evacuate everything about every 10 minutes, for hours. But I knew I was going to be OK.”
We shouldn’t fear mushrooms, DeLong-Duhon said. On forays, PSMC experts can identify the safest varieties to eat as well as the ones that are poisonous. Anyone interested in eating wild mushrooms should send photos to identification@iowamushroom.org, and a PSMC expert will help you determine what it is and whether it’s edible.
“Plus, you don’t have to be afraid of mushrooms killing you if you don’t put them in your mouth,” she said. “Lots of members become obsessed with identifying them—because it’s fun.”
DeLong-Duhon has discovered a passion for photographing mushrooms, and especially enjoys taking pictures of teeny-tiny fungi, the ones most people might miss.
A shout resounded across the hillside. Someone found morels. We all tromped toward the sound.
We found ourselves in a grove of elm trees. Someone pointed to the leaf litter on the ground where a cluster of three morels spawned. We all came close for a look. The lucky finder gently picked the honeycomb-capped morsels and put them in a paper bag.
“Oh, there’s one! There’s another.” Everyone was focused on the ground. Each of us wanted to be the one to spot another morel. By the time we moved on, we’d collected about a dozen.
Or at least the people who’d actually spotted the morels did. The rest of us started to succumb to mushroom envy, which pressed us to search all the harder. Even without finds, looking for mushrooms in the woods is delightful. At this time of year, spring ephemerals are blooming.
“Did you know you can eat these?” asked one of the mushroom experts. She picked the white and pink candy-striped flowers off of a spring beauty and popped them in her mouth. The rest of us followed suit: the flowers were tender and slightly sweet.
Picking and eating something you’ve come across in the woods is an amazingly satisfying experience. This is probably one reason why people like foraging for mushrooms so much, even with storebought fungi easily accessible.
At the end of this foray, we met back at the picnic shelter. Some of us checked our smartwatches. We hadn’t walked very far in those two hours. We’d gone slowly, scanning the ground, stopping to take photos, chatting with one another about the birds we heard (house wren, northern parula), discussing ways to prepare our finds for dinner and admiring each other’s mushroom-themed clothing.
We laid the total score out on the table: a couple handfuls of morels, some sweet-smelling pheasant backs, hexagonal pored polypores, slowly deliquescing inky caps and some turkey tails.
Not a truckload, but maybe it was better: for those two hours, we paid attention to the natural world. We connected to one another, shared with one another, and learned the names of some of the weirdest living things on the planet.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s June 2025 issue.
