For the last three years, Wurtz has been studying morels--why they grow, where they grow, if they'll grow. Last year she used global positioning satellites to map how many fruited in a one-hectare area, and this summer she hopes to persuade a few pickers to attach small GPS units to their baseball caps.
"This is classic morel habitat," says Wurtz as she slips on an orange safety vest and tromps into the forest. It's not an easy walk, over blackened tree trunks collapsed on spongy tundra, which sometimes gives way to melted permafrost. There is also a low-level hum, which turns out to be mosquitoes, biblical numbers of mosquitoes, so many that Wurtz says the way an Alaskan counts them is by slapping his knee and then counting the corpses.
Seventy-five is her personal best, she says, and then crouches over what she thinks is a promising spot for morels. "This is fire ash on top of a little bit of moss, but mostly the moss has been consumed by fire, and then these needles"--short, dry spruce needles. "This is exactly the place I'd look."
Looking for morels turns out to be a bit like studying an "I Spy" illustration, in which many things that could be what you're looking for are not. Is that a morel? No, it's a spruce cone. That? Moose spoor. That? Mud clump. Wurtz points out tiny orange mushrooms she calls firecups (and others call buttercups or firecaps) that are thought to be a precursor to morels. Though not today; today, Wurtz finds nothing.
The 200-mile drive from Fairbanks to Tok goes past the highway-adjacent town of North Pole, with its 900-pound fiberglass Santa Claus fronting Santaland RV Park; past Delta Junction, "Home of Missile Defense in Alaska"; and, once across the Big Delta Bridge, with its view of the pipeline suspended over the Tanana River, through 100 miles of hills covered with carbonized spruce.
Tok itself, population 1,400, has one main road on whose shoulder little kids trick-ride ATVs, two chain-saw repair shops and a restaurant that stops serving breakfast at 8:30 a.m. In the first week of June, what it has in abundance are handmade signs that say "Mushroom Buyer," maybe half a dozen of them propped up at intersections and in motel parking lots. On the south end of town, next to a long shed-like structure painted with the words FLEA MARKET, Jay Southard has set up the area's most prominent buying station, two tables beneath a plastic canopy. Several of the blue Chinese dryers sit idle. So does Southard.
