The Great Alaskan Morel Rush of '05

Tracking wildfires in order to locate next year's crops is Wild Mushrooming 101. And most species that grow on the West Coast are reliable: Every spring there will be morels from Northern California to British Columbia; chanterelles flourish in the Pacific Northwest's coastal regions in late summer; and come fall in central Oregon there's the matsutake, a mushroom so highly prized by the Japanese that in years past it has sold for $1,200 a pound.

Of course, dependent as it is upon acts of god or accidents of nature, the mushroom trade is extraordinarily risky. Colloquially known as "cash in the woods," it can be quite profitable. In 2004, Alpine Foragers' Exchange, the company Jay Southard buys for, purchased more than 200,000 pounds of chanterelles for as little as $1.50 a pound and sold them for as much as $6.50 a pound. But it can just as easily be ruinous: This year's morel harvest in Oregon was one of the worst on record.

Alaska is the great unknown on the mushroom circuit, having produced them on a commercial scale only once, after fires in 1990 resulted in what are often recalled as "carpets of morels" near Fairbanks and Tok. If this ever happened before, no one had paid much attention, but by the spring of 1991 wild mushrooms had become a culinary essential, and a few prescient buyers made their way to the state. They were amply rewarded. That year, the 98,000-acre Tok River Fire yielded a morel harvest of 300,000 pounds. By comparison, this year's burn is nearly 70 times larger.

"This is huge, this is vast," says Casey Jonquil as he spreads a USDA Forest Service map showing the extent of the fires over the counter of his gourmet kitchen in Portland, Ore. "The wilderness and the distance and the inaccessibility is very daunting, but the good news is, there are roads going right through it." His fingers trace byways near Fairbanks and Tok. "The ground is proven--Tok especially. Tok had a fire 15 years ago, and 14 years ago they kicked ass....This is the same damn ground."

Jonquil, who's been in the wild mushroom business for 16 years and owns the Portland-based purveyor Alpine, started planning his Tok operation in December. "The guy that gets the prime, killer spot can make a big difference in how the buy goes," he explains, adding that he's just gotten back from a week in Alaska, "shaking hands and writing checks." The day before, he sent a barge carrying 3,000 pounds of supplies to Tok, including hundreds of 5-kilo plastic mesh picking baskets, the sort of thing that might cost 99 cents at a Target in the lower 48 but is impossible to secure in quantity in Alaska, and several of what he calls "blue Chinese dryers," large upright boxes in which fans continuously blow warm air across racks of fresh mushrooms, drying them and thus extending their shelf life from days to years.