On Thursday, September 11, we went to an area at about 5200ft., to check out a report of many large mushrooms being found near an RV resort there. The day before I was shown by a friend some of the mushrooms he had taken from the area, and decided the mushrooms were the Boletus edulis and felt it was well worth the trip to check it out.

Like he had described, there were many on both sides of the road.  Most were old and large, but some were still fresh and worth collecting. If I had only gone when he first told me about his discovery last week!

In our searching, we also found some Shrimp Russulas (Russula xerampelina), Pine Spikes (Chroogomphus vinicolor), Blue-Staining Suillus (Suillus tomentosus), Dyer's Polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii), and what looked like light-colored Amanita muscaria.  Father south down the road, near a kiosk, we found a Ganoderma oregonense and some Gomphus floccosus. The next day, with information I got from Fred Stevens, I identified a few of them as the Boletus calopus.

The area seemed mostly covered with fir and cedar litter.  The elevation was at about 5100 ft.

These "edulis" looked a bit different than most I had seen before, with some that had caps that were wrinkled when young and fresh as well as mature, some had exaggerated reticulations (netting) on the stalk, some had pores that seemed a bit reddish, some had red on the upper portions of the stalk, and some seemed to have slightly yellow flesh in the cap.  Later, when cutting up some of the smaller ones, I noticed a slight pine fragrance.  

I talked with Fred Stevens and shown him most of the pictures, and he assured me that that I thought looked like the edulis were indeed the edulis. So I cooked up some samples, tried each of them, and all of the edulis-looking ones tasted very good and had a better texture than the B. aereus and B. edulis I had recently picked here in town.

Here are some of the pictures I took: