Boy howdy! This year has been (and likely will continue to be) lights out for mushrooms. The quality and size of the chanterelles I found on Saturday was ridiculous. In a perhaps sad and pathetic way, finding such a wealth of beautiful mushrooms has made the lack of success on salmon a bit less discouraging.

Now, for the bad news.... I have had more than one old timer around here tell me that when the mushroom picking is really good, it's a sure sign we are in for a rough winter. I don't have a lot of experience to go on, but from what I have seen since I started picking mushrooms a few years ago, I think there may be some truth to that. Last year, the mushrooms were relatively scarce, and I spent a couple of days steelheading in February that felt like June. Conversely, the year before, the mushrooms were abundant. The winter that followed was the worst I have seen in my 11 years in Washington. I have seen a lot more mushrooms this year than I did even that year, so I am hoping my limited observations have been misleading.