The Great Alaskan Morel Rush of '05

He's also hoping to move fresh, so he's lined up a refrigerated van to keep the product cool. Fresh morels are more profitable but harder to handle, because they tend to mold and melt. "Morels are like little nuclear materials," says Jonquil. "You get a bunch of them together without refrigeration ... they get this exothermic thing going. I mean, you stick your hand in there and it's hot."

Jonquil's best-case scenario is that he pays no more than $2 a pound, that he buys and dries 4,000 to 6,000 pounds a day, and that at the end of an estimated two-month season he sells $250,000 worth. "Worst case is it rains cats and dogs, and the mushrooms will come in wet and heavy and dirty." He pauses. "Well, that's not the worst. The worst was getting embezzled by a field manager's bookkeeper. Nicked me for about 40 grand, but I got 10 back."

Unpredictable weather and the perils that attend a cash business, and still, Jonquil lives in a pretty swank house.

"Mushrooms have been very, very good to me," he says.

Jay Southard is wearing a dusty Carhartt vest and ignoring a cup of coffee at a cafe in a shopping plaza outside Portland. It's late April, a week before he leaves for Tok, and he's just back from Washington state, where he tried to persuade some pickers he's worked with to make a 2,000-mile detour.

Professional mushroom pickers, known as circuit pickers, are on no one's payroll or schedule. Predominantly Mexican, Laotian and Cambodian, they sell for cash what they pick each day. Many do not maintain permanent residences, but follow the seasonal mushroom trail.

"I suggested that they carpool because of the price of gas. I figured that out for them," he says. "What scares me about this trip is getting my hard-core pickers up there." Southard has been buying mushrooms for Casey Jonquil and others for nearly 20 years, and knows a lot of pickers. He also knows what he doesn't want to see happen in Tok: local yokels manhandling the product.

"Every time you go into a new community like this, ma and pa go out there and they do it wrong," he says. "They pull 'em, they pack 'em in bags, they put 'em in their trunk when it's 80 [degrees] out and they melt down.... It's always the local guy, he knows what he's doing, he's been tipping a few back and there's always an argument. [His mushrooms] are crawling with maggots, they're covered in dirt. 'They're fine,' he says. 'Yeah? Well then, you eat them.' ... It's always that same guy. It's the same guy in every town."