The Southeast has intrigued me for a long time for its diversity of plants and fungi, a diversity I’d mostly read about in books.

The last time I’d spent any significant amount of time in the region was twenty-five years ago, during a spring break from college that involved some sketchy camping and maybe a little foraging for beer. Earlier this month I had a chance to visit again and speak to mushroom clubs in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Though fungal diversity was nowhere near what it will be come summer, the spring wildflowers were out—and so were the morels.

Aside from the pesticide-laden morels that fruit in California’s olive orchards in late winter, Georgia represents the beginning of morel season for many a roving hunter in the U.S. It was April 1 when I set forth on my first hunt in the Goober State, and I didn’t come away with any fool’s gold—just this big fat yellow below, a Georgia peach of the fungal variety.

The habitat was so different from what I’m used to in the West. Along with members of the Mushroom Club of Georgia, we scouted river bottoms, looking for concentrations of green ash. One spot within the Atlanta Metro area, filled with dog-walkers and picnickers, delivered in spades. Meanwhile, I was trying to wrap my head around all these hardwood trees that were just beginning to leaf out. Oaks and hickories, buckeyes and magnolias—too many to count, much less identify.

And like the trees, the morels were different too. Depending on which taxonomy you’re following, they carry the scientific name Morchella americana or Morchella esculentoides. Most people call them yellows. I don’t see them very often in the Pacific Northwest, though they do fruit in a few cottonwood bottomlands in select locales.

Another difference with eastern morel hunting: the beasties. I became fanatical about checking myself for ticks. I have friends who have gotten Lyme’s disease and it’s no fun. One of the little buggers managed to get its teeth into me and now I’m keeping tabs on the wound, hoping it doesn’t grow into a bull’s-eye.

The other hazard is from the plant kingdom: poison ivy. The nasty stuff was all over the woods, and at one point while I was taking a breather in the woods, leaning casually against one of the many bewildering, unidentifiable hardwoods, my companion suggested I might want to remove my hand from the thick vine of poison ivy that was trellising up the trunk. Doh!

While in Atlanta, I also loaded up on some of the local cuisine. Georgia Organics hosted an amazing dinner that featured some of the city’s notable chefs. And if you’re a Sichuan geek like me, you’ll want to run—not walk—straight to Masterpiece restaurant in nearby Duluth. I can easily say it was the best Sichuan I’ve had since going to Sichuan Province back in the summer of 2011 (don’t miss the dry-fried eggplant or the chicken with a bazillion hot chilies).

In South Carolina, my next stop, I visited Mushroom Mountain, where cultivator Tradd Cotter is growing enough mushrooms, such as these elm oysters pictured at right, to interest Whole Foods. As for the wild ones, the yellows that I found were much smaller and grew mostly with tulip poplars. Locals call them tulip morels. Cryptic and incredibly hard to find (see below), they hid among the leaf litter, often barricaded by poison ivy. With help from the South Carolina Upstate Mycological Society, affectionately known as SCUMS to its members, we sleuthed them out, again in river bottom woods.

The Asheville Mushroom Club in North Carolina was my last stop, but we snuck over the border into Tennessee for morels, where we found the tulip variety as well as my first eastern black morels, pictured below, which proved tricky to spot given all the fallen leaves.

We hunted an area on the edge of Smoky Mountain National Park, where trillium, violets, trout lilies (pictured above) and other wildflowers were in full glorious bloom. The Smokies, I’m told, hold the highest plant biodiversity in North America. Whereas we have one species of trillium in the Pacific Northwest, the Southeast has forty!

Next time—and there will definitely be a next time—I’m returning with my backpack and tent so I can disappear into the Smokies or the Blue Ridge for a spell. Brook trout with wild mushroom stuffing, anyone?

A couple weekends ago I took my kids on our first morel hunt of the season. We rode bikes a ways up a trail before stashing our transportation and striking out on foot. At first it seemed like we might be too early—or worse, that another morel hunter had scooped us. There was some grumbling within the ranks.

And then we stepped over an old rotting log and there they were.

The first morels of the season are sun worshipers. They stray far from dark woods, popping up in warm, exposed spots where many morel hunters would never think to look.

But we were not alone. On our way back we spied a couple covering the same ground we had just been through. When they caught a glimpse of us in the distance, they scuttled into the woods. My kids found this behavior curious. It’s not like we didn’t know what they were up to—they had a huge woven basket for crying out loud.

Being the rascally imps they are, the kids decided they would try to flush out these furtive mushroom hunters. Pretending to be birdwatchers, they lingered at the spot on the trail where the couple had vanished into the woods. The mushrooms, after all, were on the edges—not in deep, dark thickets. These coy morel hunters would have to come out of hiding at some point if they wanted to find any.

“Look, a yellow warbler!”

We stood there for 15 minutes calling out birds. All the while we could see one of the couple crouched behind a tree. She hid there obstinately and wouldn’t move. I continued on the trail, but the kids weren’t done with their torments. As I walked off, I saw them skulking behind some bushes, laying in wait. A moment later they came running up excitedly with news that the couple had emerged as soon as I’d left.

Busted!

Another lesson learned on the mushroom trail…

I read somewhere recently that North America is the center of morel diversity on the planet. This news shouldn’t surprise hardcore morel hunters in the New World, who already know firsthand about morels yet to be described in the scientific literature, some of which have funny common names like “bananas” and “pickles.” The pickle, for instance, is a type of burn morel found late in the season with a dark, greenish hue and thick, three-walled flesh. Pickles (also called “greenies”) are so dense they resist drying efforts. Most recreational mushroom hunters have never seen a pickle but commercial harvesters in the Northwest are familiar with such oddities in the Morchella genus—as are a handful of chefs in the know.

Another morel that only received species status in 2008 is known to hunters in the Western U.S. and Canada as the gray morel, Morchella tomentosa (not to be confused with the Midwestern “gray” which is an immature yellow morel, Morchella esculenta). It’s also a late-fruiting species that inhabits burned conifer forests, usually coming on the heels of the conica flush (Morchella conica is the Latin name preferred by commercial pickers for the most common species of burn morel, though this Old World name could be subject to change with future DNA testing). Unlike many species of morels, grays can be readily identified on sight. They have two main color types: gray and blonde (though some refer to intermediate browns as well); their caps are densely pitted; and their stems are darker and thicker than most other species. Grays also have tell-tale hairs, especially near the base of the stem when young, that are easily seen with a hand lens; hence their other common name: fuzzy foot morel.

The photo above shows typical grays (background), blonde grays (right foreground), and conicas (left foreground), all in the same frame. Many restaurateurs prefer the thin-walled conicas because they’re lightweight and thus more morels can be plated per serving, at least visually. Besides, grays typically command a higher price in the marketplace. But chefs looking for the best quality morels are apt to swoon over the pricier yet meatier grays.

Last week I had the chance to introduce Daniel Klein of The Perennial Plate to his first gray morels. Daniel has hunted morels in his home state of Minnesota before, but he’d never seen anything like the lightning burn I took him to in the North Cascades. We backpacked in several miles and spent a late afternoon slogging up and down the steep, scorched sides of a remote drainage above 5,000 feet. Rocky taluses, logjams of downed timber, and ash-covered slopes conspired to trip us up in the bush, and the mosquitoes were hell.

Despite all this, Daniel was grinning. Now he understood what all the fuss was about with Western burn morels. “They’re everywhere!” he said, incredulous. To be honest, I was a little disappointed. We were a week late—or maybe a week early. The conicas were drying out fast and the grays had only just begun.

Still, we found enough of both species to enjoy a big camp meal of Fettuccine with Morels and Herbs beside an alpine lake and take home a load for the dehydrator. The scenery was spectacular and we had that good feeling in our bodies of muscle exertion that always accompanies a vigorous trek into the wilderness. The only thing missing was a hip flask of Beam to pass around as the stars began to wink on after dusk.

I saved my nicest grays in the fridge for a special meal a few days later, cooking up a favorite surf ‘n’ turf stir-fry for friends old and new, Sichuan Fish-Fragrant Geoduck with Morels. Normally this dish showcases the clam, but gray morels are so hearty and flavorful they managed to stand up to the main ingredient. It was a feast fit for the king of morels.