Spring 2026 Mushroom Season Recap
- jaymecastro617
- Jun 30
- 7 min read
Saying Goodbye to Spring
By now we just have to accept it. come to terms with it. Spring mushroom season in Mount Shasta is virtually over. What remains are the straggling last gaspers - the descendants of the frugal moisture that last landed in the highlands. In the same fashion, desolate mushroom hunters remain on the trail of the fungi, canvasing the remaining microclimates for the last of the bug-free butter boletes and porcini - perhaps a miraculously pristine morel will call it good and we can go home. Nature doesn’t send a memo and so we must see for ourselves, just to make sure it’s actually over. If you are still out there wandering and searching, driving those dirt roads and sending up plumes of summer dust, I commend you for your dedication. I admittedly have been out there too with varying but dwindling degrees of luck. Before long, you accept the truth, put away the foraging knife, the field guide, and wait for conditions that signal mushrooms are on their way. It may be a while, but for now I want to reflect and briefly summarize what is was like paying attention to and participating in Mount Shasta's spring mushroom season.
A Season That Seemed Unlikely
Spring 2026 mushroom season in Mount Shasta was notable, maybe even legendary, but it certainly was not projected to be that way. A March heat wave and lackluster snowpack shuttered ski park operations and it appeared our mushroom season might be eaten alive by this trend.
On average, I spot my first morel mid to late April at about 5,000 feet altitude. This year, on March 16th, I spotted my first morels of the season — Morchella brunnea — in a mixed forest at 3,500 feet while temperatures lingered in the high 80's. Together, after hours of searching, a friend and I collected six specimens that day, lamenting on the outlook. The sentiment was similar in the online groups with increased talk of a bunk mushroom season. Maybe that was just the duality of coming off an epic Fall mushroom season. My hope was the moisture of the fall and winter would somehow pick back up in the spring and we’d be swimming in mushrooms again.
A Roller Coaster of Weather
By mid-March I had seen most of the classic spring fruiting species — Gyromitra, Helvella, and Verpa that comprise (the “early” or “false morels”), morel indicators like Sarcospharea and other cup fungi, as well as morels themselves. They were present, but not plentiful, and drying out quickly. Everything was fruiting fast, and without additional moisture the season looked destined to end early.
The heat had already melted much of the snowpack that provides spring mushrooms with moisture while buffering against dramatic swings in soil temperature, allowing the season to progress gradually in elevation. This year I was driving into areas in late March that normally remain snowbound until May. Mushrooms were fruiting across a wide range of elevations all at once, and most were drying out just as quickly.
A cold front at the beginning of April brought a brief return of winter, with freezing temperatures and renewed snowpack. Bad news for fruit growers, but good news for mushroom hunters.
I found my first Spring King at 3,400 feet on April 1st, so early it lead to speculation of an April Fool's joke.
By mid-April, another winter-like storm, dropped nearly 20 inches of dense snow on Mount Shasta's slopes, followed by another 6 -7 inches later in the month, while rain fell at lower elevations. After this moisture returned, morels began fruiting in abundance — not only the familiar black morels (Morchella snyderii), but also Mountain Blond Morels (Morchella tridentina) fruiting in favorable numbers.
The unusual weather left many people wondering what elevation to search. Lower elevation spots that barely fruited during the March heatwave did not rebound following the April storms because soil temperatures had already become too warm, shifting fruiting zones into the higher elevations. Success required the right habitat, adequate moisture and the right soil temperatures.
Forecasting mushrooms is never straightforward, as this oddball season demonstrated. Still, undertanding the relationships between air and soil temperatures, indicator plants and fungi, moisture, and elevation can go a long way.
The Mushroom Season Unfolds
By mid-April it was on. Temperatures were stabilizing and more rain was in the forecast. The morel season was making an epic comeback, and as an added bonus, Blond morels (M. tridentina) were coming up in great numbers, right alongside the typical Black Morels (M snyderi). Blond morels are genetically a black morel, but most hunters don’t care about those specifics - treasure is treasure! Blonds are much easier to spot on the forest floor with their yellow, honey-combed caps that appear to be made of wax when young. While M. snyderi is more dependable to fruit each season, the blonds are virtually absent some years around here, so finding them together is another memorable part of this season.
April 26th brought the heaviest downpour in the Shasta region with an intense 1.39 inches in four hours bringing the month’s total to over 4 inches - doubling the typical historical average for April.
Mushrooms responded in a fruiting frenzy. Morels popped up in dramatic fashion on the forest floor. Not a lackluster morel here and there, but lines, clusters, and rosettes - some numbering 10 or more specimens per cluster! Porcini responded in similar exuberance with clusters of dense, hard buttons exploding from the ground. If you were in the right zone, you could fill a basket with both morels and porcini in a few hours or less. One “problem” that many of us faced was how to pick mushrooms without stepping on them!
May started off with temperatures reaching mid 80’s to low 90’s and by the second week or so, the Butter Boletes started to fruit which often signals the beginning of the end for morels and porcini, but late May rains recharged the soil enough to trigger another flush of mushrooms, especially in the higher elevation zones, bringing forth more porcini, butter boletes— even another round of morels.
The false starts and fake outs of this mushroom season were enough to keep us on the edge of our seats. It was like nature’s thriller episode for the mycophiles, and as I reflect on it, I wouldn’t have changed a thing about how it played out.
Nobody could have seen this coming, and there were more than just morels and boletes to relish - some of the highlights were the lesser-known species also showing up in abundance.
Beyond Morels and Boletes
Morels and Boletes may be the highlight of Mount Shasta mushrooms in many people’s eyes, but they are just a small part of Shasta’s remarkable diversity. If you were out in the forest searching for the popular varieties, you surely crossed paths with lesser understood varieties that fly under the radar of most mushroom hunters. A few of my favorite observations included edible and non-edible species alike.
The Mountain Almond Agaricus (Agaricus moronii) is a notable mushroom that appeared in exciting quantities and is one of my favorite edible species. This one lingered longer than I expected, finding fresh rings of them in fir duff in mid-May in the elevation zones where the porcini had mostly bugged out.
Some uncommon and rare species that I observed in surprising quantity were Cantharocybe gruberi — a large flush I had initially mistaken for puffballs due to their dry, cracked caps reminiscent of Calvatia. This species is a lesser-known edible which I tried for my first time this year and I really enjoyed it!
Calocybe onychina was observed multiple times, most memorably when I pulled my car over to find them lining a dirt road with 20 or more specimens. Never have I seen this species so prolific.
Aphroditeola olida - the pink bubblegum mushroom, I observed once this season- a pleasant, aromatic surprise that is rare.
Galeropsis polytrichoides, a slender secotioid species that belongs in the genus Psilocybe was spotted relatively frequently this season in the highlands hiding amongst grasses. It was a prime target species for an outing with the Mount Shasta Mycological Society where we successfully located a number of specimens to everyone’s delight.
Lessons From This Season
One of the best things about mushroom hunting is the unpredictability of nature. If the same species appeared on schedule in the exact same spot, year after year, it would take the heart out of the hunt and that feeling of discovery that mushrooms evoke.
There are useful generalizations for timing your hunts - patterns built from years of observation and learning from others - but so much still depends on nature's timing, which often matters more than averages. Rainfall is important, but it doesn't tell the whole story. each season carries its own nuances and variables that can make or break it, and each season offers lessons to be learned.
I believe in these in these useful generalizations as ways to guide your hunt, but there is always an element of luck: being at the right place at the right time, pulling over for a quick stop and stumbling into a new patch, or spotting that roadside morel that leads you to clusters deeper in the forest.
If I were a gambler, I wouldn’t have placed my money on the mushrooms this year, but mushrooms don't seem to respect odds - and they often seem to defy them. This season was a great example of the surprises mushrooms and nature can bring.
Looking Ahead
Spring has passed and Summer is here; baskets were filled in moments of hunter gatherer glee. We’ve returned home with stories about the quantity and sizes of the mushrooms we found, with pictures for proof! Though the mushrooms have dwindled and the season shut its door, the source of the fruitbodies remains quietly at work regenerating and preparing for the next reproductive trigger that will once again bring the forest to life.
I will see you again in the fall.
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