A Trip Up the Grays, Looking for Morels

Last week we decided to take a trip up the Greys River, again in search of the mythical morel mushroom. This time we were going to travel to the Martin Creek Fire, which is located only seventeen miles away, (as the crow flies and so the one-way trip of sixty five miles took almost two hours).

However here is a mountain range in the way, the Salt Range, and we had to drive north to Alpine and then turn up the Greys river road for about forty-five addition miles of good and not so good gravel. At first the gravel road was good but after a while it bean to narrow.

The road became rough and at one point a busy beaver had constructed a new dam causing a channel of the river to partially flood the road. It was a narrow channel and the base gravel looked good, so I put the truck into four-wheel drive and drove through the submerged road.

Before you think that is crazy, or stupid, there were two other sets of fresh tires tracks on the other side. It wasn't any problem getting through and so we continued up to the burned area. No one was there so we parked the truck and hiked through two different areas of burned trees.  The end result, was that we didn’t find any morel mushroom.

There were no people tracks, so it hadn’t been walked, and we didn’t find any evidence of cut stems, which show up quite nicely in a burn area. It seemed to us that with the abnormally cold weather. It was still too early.

We only spent a few hours searching, before we headed back down stream. There was a bit of concern that the river may rise, due to the afternoon snow melt, and that we could be stranded till the next day, (mountain streams can turn from trickles into raging torrents as the afternoon snow melt accelerates).

It was all needless concern as the river hadn’t risen, and we easily forded the flooded road before finding a nice spot for a picnic. After our picnic lunch, we headed back home. We did spot several deer and at one point a doe with two fawns crossed the road before us.

It had turned out to be a nice day, and what more could one ask for than to spend a day in the mountains together, after all there is a blessing in every day, (we later learned that a few people were finding some little grey morels). Clear skies