The Great Alaskan Morel Rush of '05

There's a new sign posted on the Taylor Highway, a big one warning mushroom pickers about the bear bait sites, a state-sponsored program to capture and thus thin out Alaska's bear population. Picking mushrooms when there are not merely bears known to be in the area but food stations set up specifically to attract them adds a certain something to the experience, something that goes like: Scan ground for morels, scan perimeter for bears. Scan ground, scan perimeter. Scan perimeter.

There are more morels today: golds poking out of the tundra; grays on one nearly treeless patch where the fire burned hot; conicas everywhere else. And yet the buy barely nudges up. Besides the Mexicans, who bring in 550 pounds, Southard has only two other sellers.

At 7 p.m. an old man in a crusty flannel shirt stops by and asks for any special instructions. Southard tells him, same as he told him last time: Don't crush them. Not too much dirt.

"Do I have to stand them upright?" asks the man.

"No, you can just use a 5-gallon bucket," Southard says.

"And what can't I put on them?"

Southard audibly exhales. "Well, you don't want to put sand on them or salt the load or anything."

"And I won't pee on them," says the man, smiling. "That's what we used to do when we picked cotton--we'd pee in the bag before they weighed it, so it weighed more."

A few minutes later, two Laotian pickers pull in. Even before their pickup stops, the woman is hanging out the window. "How much you pay?"

"Four-fifty," says Southard. He knows Ouk has come down, and is paying $4.50 today.

"Five dollars," the woman counters.

Southard inspects what they've got, weighs it and, as he hands her $147, asks, "Do you have a permit?"

The woman just laughs.

Anyone traveling from Tok to the burn passes the Great Alaska Mushroom Co., situated in an open hangar under a really big sign.

Rick Bernhardt says he's the first Alaskan to own a mushroom company, or so he was told when he got his business license earlier this year. Raised in Tok, he was here in 1991 and "saw the community not benefit as fully as it could have."

Bernhardt says he did "extensive research" on the morel, and that local support has been tremendous. "If we got one call we got a thousand from locals saying, 'When we pick, we'll bring them to you,' " he says, though his role as civic booster is somewhat offset by the fact that he has professional pickers flying in. "We got two teams of 15--a Korean bunch, and another out of Oregon and Washington."