Somewhere in the thick forest above Red Feather Lakes, mushroom foragers Tom McKinnon and Jay Berger were puzzling over a backcountry map, debating the most approachable route to the Pearl Fire burn scar. The130 acres of scorched mountaintop that burned last September in a remote part of Northern Larimer County may hold a treasure trove of mushrooms.
There are no hiking trails here. McKinnon and Gerber traced out a rough route towards the northeastern perimeter of the scar. They pushed ahead through the gnarly terrain, but a few scratches hardly register when you’ve caught the fever for burn morels, a very special kind of wild mushroom.
“I don't think we'd come walking up these rocky hillsides and over all these downed trees just looking for any other mushroom,” Berger said. “You really have to work hard to find burn morels.”
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Mushrooms are having a moment in Colorado. Mycological societies are suddenly hot. Foraging is more popular than ever. Earlier this year, the state even adopted its first official mushroom. Amid that hype, the burn morel stands apart. It’s prized for its tastiness. It’s enigmatic and particular about its environment. And according to experienced forager Kristen Blizzard, the burn morel loves a good wildfire.
“(Burn) morels pop in crazy numbers after wildfires in the West, if the right kind of forest has burned,” Blizzard said. “And if you have consistent average precipitation and good snow pack.”
Blizzard is co-founder of Modern Forager, an online clearinghouse for all things burn morel - including detailed maps of promising burn scars in conifer forests from Colorado all the way to Alaska. The most promising areas are where the forest has only partially burned.
“You would want to look for areas with brown needles on the ground and needles left in the trees,” she said. “Lots of structure left in the forest, because the morels are going to appreciate those shady areas that are retaining moisture.”
Burn morels are but a small subset of the Morchella genus of fungi, beloved as a culinary delicacy. Most species of Morchella mushrooms grow in reliable, if dainty numbers, in the same area year after year – coveted hot spots that foragers hoard as secrets.
“In the East and in the Midwest, they are revered as sort of like a generational pastime,” Blizzard said. “It's something that grandparents have been passing down through the generations for years.”
Burn morels on the other hand, are wonderfully prolific. Blizzard described flushes that produce thousands of mushrooms at a time. But they’re also very fleeting – they only fruit in the immediate wake of a wildfire.
“They show up the spring after the fire, in years one through three,” Blizzard said. “This year, in 2025, we are hunting 2024 wildfire scars.”
The mania
Burn morels inspire a special passion. Blizzard described a morel craze that sets in early each year.
“We have people, like ‘when, when are the maps coming out? When are the maps ready?’” Blizzard said. “It starts happening around the first of February, and they still have months before they can get out into the woods and get those first mushrooms, but they are just chomping on the bit to get into the forest.”
Foragers say finding that first big cluster of burn morels after a long hunt is a jolt to the system – a massive dopamine hit.
“Like you get hit by lightning,” McKinnon said. “It's just shocking and it's fun. All at once.”
“Your energy triples, quadruples. It's infinite,” Berger said. “Then you get in your blood, and you want to go back out.”
On a good hunt, burn morel foragers can fill buckets at a time. Then comes the feasting.
“They're absolutely delicious,” Blizzard said. “They're meaty. It's got all the umami. It's got this really wonderful texture.”
Scientific enigmas
For all their popularity burn morels remain a mystery to science. According to University of California Riverside microbiologist and plant pathologist Sydney Glassman, who studies pyrophilous – or fire loving – fungi, we’ve known for a long time that certain fungi,including burn morels,respond to wildfires, but we don’t know much else.
“Even really basic questions about fungal biology are still not really known,” said Glassman,. “I can't say for sure, but they're probably living symbiotically in pine tree roots.”
When a burn comes through, Kansas State University fungal ecologist Ari Jumponnen said there are several things that could be happening to spark a morel flush.
“We do not exactly know where that morel comes from,” he said. “Is it spore stimulation by the heat pulse, or is it something that changes the chemistry of the soil? It is not quite a straight cut question as one might imagine.”
They could also be taking advantage of the brief window of environmental sterility after a burn.
“And all of a sudden (burn morels) are able to to grow since everything else is dead in this competitor-free environment,” Glassman said. “But anyone who tells you that they know the answer is lying to you.”
Wildfire connection
What we do know is that they tend to fruit in uniquely massive numbers after wildfires. And as our climate warms, wildfires are growing more frequent in Colorado and throughout the west. This would appear to be good news for the burn morel crowd.
But according to Jumponnen, wildfires are necessary, but not sufficient. Burn morels have a host of other environmental requirements, like adequate moisture and mild temperatures, that are also affected by a warming climate. Which means those wildfires might be burning in areas too hot and dry to produce mushrooms.
Those environmental factors might have been at play for McKinnon and Berger at the Pearl Fire scar. After five unsuccessful hours McKinnon was ready to call it.
“Sometimes the drought is stronger than the morels will to survive,” he said.
If the summer monsoons are good, they said they might try again, later in the season. In the meantime, they planned to be vigilant as the next wildfire season developed, so they could be ready for next year.
