The Great Alaskan Morel Rush of '05

"It's a real moving target," says Jonquil. "We have to see what happens in China and India and Pakistan and Turkey--though we know Turkey did not have a good season. China just keeps getting better and better at what they do every year, and in India and Pakistan they dry the morels over dung fires--which I like, they taste great, kind of with a bacony flavor--but Europe doesn't want them smoked like that anymore."

Back in Portland, the dried morels will be sorted, conicas and grays and jumbos, and two additional grades that go to Europe, extras, which have stems, and specials, which are stemless and bring a higher price.

"And of course, the pickers pick them with stems, because they weigh more," Jonquil says. Other weight-gain methods include a "river-dip," and stuffing each morel with a BB or a pebble.

Buyers, too, have their tricks, from the egregious--a sponge placed beneath the scale so it weighs light--to the plebeian, such as big-screen TVs, loud music and women in low-cut tops at the buying stations to distract the pickers.

Then there are those buyers who raise the price per pound unconscionably, until other buyers can't or won't meet it and fold, whereupon the high-price buyer drops his price. One such buyer, well known to the Alpine crew, is a man they call the Weasel.

"He's known to run down cars in the road and pull people's mushroom haul out and start weighing," Rankin says.

He also drove into town today, and is rumored to be paying $6 a pound.

"Whether someone thinks something is edible or delicious is really not an absolute," says Sveta Yamin, a graduate student in cultural anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who is writing her dissertation on how the natives on both sides of the Bering Strait use their sustainable resources.

"I'm focusing my project on mushroom picking, because right now it's probably one of the most striking differences," says Yamin, a native of Belarus who wears her gold hair in dreadlocks. "On the Russian side, mushrooms are really an integral and important part of subsistence, and in Alaska, they're not perceived as food, so far.... They use fungi historically as mosquito repellent."

Yamin is in Tok to gauge the impact of a series of well-attended community extension classes sponsored by the university that taught the local population about the morel and its potential as a cash crop.