Edibles

[dave54]

No one mentioned pine nuts?

[cgundersen]

Aviprk & Bsquared,
I hoisted a link to a decent webpage for boletes that I'll paste below; otherwise, Google searches should be good for getting pictures and info on the rest of the edibles. As for pine nuts, I've found that animals/insects tend to beat me to pine nuts more often than worms beat me to boletes, and at least with the latter, you can usually cut out the wormy part (unless you like worms).
Here's the link: http://www.mykoweb.com/CAF/species/Boletus_edulis.html
cameron

[BSquared]

Thanks, Cameron! Looks like what you (or more specifically Mykoweb) are telling me is that Boletus edulis is Boletus edulis, and it looks the same in the Sierras as in the Snowies. :retard: Doh. Don't know why I should have thought differently. In Wyoming the prime season was always right around end of August; is it the same in the Sierras? Also, we'd typically look right below timberline (around 10,000' in the Snowies), in places where forests and meadows interfaced. They appeared to be associated mainly with lodgepoles, but sometimes with the occasional spruce; no spruces in the Sierra, are lodgepoles good bets?

[cgundersen]

Hi Bsquared,
I've run into boletes as low as about 7,000 and as high as 11,000 ft and usually within a few dozen meters of creeks (hmmm, I'm probably very seldom more than a few dozen meters from a creek in the Sierras), and the best season is exactly as you found in Wyoming: late Aug till mid-Sept. And if it helps with a mental image of the terrain that is conducive, the best haul of boletes I made was on the Minaret Lake trail in the region between the point where the John Muir trail splits off and up to about the point the trail cuts off to the Minaret mine. Of course, you can do well on segments of the River trail out of Agnew meadows, too. The brown caps of the boletes tend to blend well with the pine needle ground cover from which they sprout, so you do have to pay some attention. On the other hand, they will sprout in grassy meadows and then they're very easy to spot!
cameron

[giantbrookie]

I don't always remember what I ate (other than fish) in the Sierra vs Klamaths or elsewhere (such as Bitterroots, MT), but wild onions are always a regular. Sage has been a good extra ingredient here and there. Ate a lot more berries (thimbleberries, raspberries, blackberries) in the Klamaths and Montana, but I do remember the stunted huckleberry(?) bushes with superb fruit when ascending toward Reinstein Pass from Lake 10212--that was a nice snack. My wife won't eat wild onions anymore, though, after a rather hideous experience in the Marble Mtns. It seems we harvested a whole lot of wild onions to put in our noodles and apparently didn't look very carefully at what was in it (it was dark when we were preparing dinner). After eating her first bowl, my wife said she felt sick to her stomach, hurled, and in the mass of regurgitated green onions was the biggest millipede I've ever seen, still wiggling. I'm still not sure how the millipede survived what should have been scalding then stomach juices, but there were so many green onions in the pot and the stuff on the top may not have gotten that hot.

[Sierra Maclure]

Currants, gooseberries, wild onions fried up in butter and added to anything, penneyroyal tea, yampah roots, trainwrecker 'shrooms. I've got a great pix of a wild onion growing at Tioga Pass. If I get around to it I'll post it. I used to teach a survival class in the Golden Trout Wilderness. The take-home lesson was that in the Sierra you spend more calories obtaining food than what you get from it, unless of course you're a fly fisherman at Tomahawk Lake in Humphreys Basin.