I’ve titled this the ‘Mushroom Ride’ but that wasn’t what it was planned to be. I hadn’t been up the Seymour valley for about a month, and I’ve made it a soft goal that I get up there once a month so I prioritized the valley for my route selection on this ride.
I actually set off to ride to mid-valley, but ended up riding all the way up to Seymour lake because the mid-valley connector was temporarily closed and I didn’t want to just turn around and go home.
I stopped where I had taken a foliage photo last time I was up here – the big leaf maples at that time were just newly yellow – and now they’d dropped all their leaves and looked entirely different. Below is Nov 2 vs Oct 7.
It was just a normal ride until I rode past a few folks who seemed to be inspecting stuff near the forest floor along Fisherman’s trail. I started to look around the forest floor once I passed them and realized there were a lot of mushrooms. I stopped to admire and photograph a couple of them, and just like that, my ride had a newfound purpose: to see how many different mushrooms I could spot.
I became quite obsessive from here on out scoping the forest floor either side of the trail for mushrooms. I was quite successful, seeing quite a few types that I’d never seen before. Mostly, I was appreciating the excuse to slow down and pay close attention to my surroundings, which is a very meditative experience that fills me with contentedness.
I kind of felt like I was birding in the sense that I was quantifying the different species I could spot, but unlike birding, the subject matter stays perfectly still – making photography a heck of a lot easier.
While I’m no mushroom expert – heck, not even a mushroom novice – there was one type of mushroom I had found up in the valley two years’ prior which captivated me named the violet webcap. Apparently it is quite rare, and I had just happened upon them deep in the valley previously. I really wanted to find one today.
It took quite a lot of trudging around in the mossy understory to find one, but I did! See below, center. It was alone in this case.
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