Sandpoint, ID

For some things, you just have to get down on your belly.
Autumn brings some phenomenal changes to the Idaho Panhandle, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by grand vistas and calendar-worthy sunsets. If you shorten your focal plane just a bit, you’ll zero in on leaves pirouetting to earth and the glow of slanted rays coursing through old oaks, maples, and elms.
But if you really want to get a glimpse of some first-rate, kaleidoscopic attractions, you must get face down in the duff. That’s where mushrooms of all ilk are bursting forth, spreading their canopies in the sun, lending their hues to the understory, casting their spores to the breeze.
One sunny afternoon, when we had a couple of hours to spare and didn’t want to squander them at work, we nosed around our property (and a few places that shall remain secret in accordance with the mycophile’s code) to see just how many varieties of fungi were out there…rather, down there.
Before we left the confines of our yard, we’d found 11 different members of the mushroom family—including a couple of distant cousins. Once we struck out for more exotic environs, the count rose.

We nudged boletes with our knuckles and tweaked polypores with our toes. We squeezed mature puffballs to eject their cargos of vaporous spores. We marveled at fairy rings and wondered about the symbiotic arrangement between the fungi and algae in a patch of lichen.
We got our hands and knees covered with dirt. Like unsupervised kids sent home from church in their finest clothes, we reveled in soil.

A while later we strolled along the street, waiting for evening to overtake us. As we dodged golden leaves drifting down from a venerable maple, our attention was drawn aloft by a strange rustling. Wagging to and fro in the wind, a basketball-sized hornets’ nest contrasted nicely with the backlit tree.
For some things, you just have to look up.

(Anyone looking for mushrooms can start in their own lawn, where shaggy manes, various amanitas, and russulas pop up. A lawn is a good place to see fairy rings, too. For less familiar species–chantrelles, boletes, puffballs, and some polypores–head to the woods and look beneath firs and larches, beside piles of leaves, along the roots of living trees where there’s lots of duff, and around rotting stumps and logs. Some specimens are very small, so you might have to look carefully).