Episode 238 - Mushroom Talks with Jonathan Kranz

[00:00:29] The bushwhacks were some of the worst days I've ever had in the mountains, or life really. Whereas Pantsy Mountain is totally opposite, it's a mountain on top of a crater. I think the weather challenges on this incident were particularly difficult. It improves the development of New York State. Catskills will respond to it.

[00:00:52] Passing into Inside The Line, the Catskill Mountains Podcast. Alright, Episode 238, Jonathan Kranz joins us. Did I say that correctly? Kranz. Kranz.

[00:01:18] God, I gotta learn this stuff before I start the intro, Ted. I'm getting bad at this. You know, you actually pronounced it correctly. My family changed the pronunciation, I don't know, generations ago. But the T would be, you know, the German Kranz would be right. But we decided to soften it a long, long time ago. So we kept the correct spelling. That's good. So Jonathan Kranz will join us tonight talking about mushroom, fungi and forests.

[00:01:48] You know, Jonathan has, I met him growing up Thomas Cole Mountain months ago doing my trail maintenance. And this guy was mushroom hunting like crazy. Had, within the five minutes I met him, just had a boatload of information. I'm just like, this guy needs to come on the show. He's been, tells me he's been coming to the Catskills for over 40 years. So he's well acquainted with what we have here, even though he lives in Massachusetts. So that's no problem when this guy has been coming here for 40 years, probably knows way more than I do. So welcome to the show, John.

[00:02:18] Oh, thank you so much. It's great to be here. Very excited. Yeah. So is it, can we Jonathan or John? Jonathan. Yeah. Go with Jonathan. I've married three syllables. Yeah. All right. All right. So Jonathan is here tonight. So first off, let's talk about this. We were always talking about mountain lions on the show. So over in California, famed mountain lion P 22 is finally getting a permanent memorial.

[00:02:43] So if you haven't heard about the mountain lion over and called the Hollywood cat over in California called P 22, he is getting a proper memorial over there in Griffin Parth, Los Angeles, because this guy was once again, a famous mountain lion that crossed a bunch of highways. 101. Let's see. 101 and 405 freeways busy as heck and claimed a lot of lives and such. And they are putting a memorial for this mountain lion down in Los Angeles.

[00:03:12] And it's titled earth to city Rhapsody of a wild King located off Griffin Park. So a little bit of background about P 22 was an adult male mountain lion who survived crossing the crazy freeways over there. And he is also famous for being the mountain lion who walked kind of like I did a famous picture. I think they did that trail cam that was in front of the Hollywood sign.

[00:03:36] So this, this mountain lion was not, was, it was like back and forth of it being kind of out in the wild, but not, you know, it didn't mess with people. Um, it just walked around and, you know, did its thing and stuff. And, uh, they have that picture. It's called the famous Hollywood cat and such.

[00:03:55] Um, unfortunately on December, 2022, he began exhibiting unusual behavior, like attacking packs, including leash dogs being walked with its owner near the Hollywood reservoir. They captured the cougar and it's determined Syrian for injuries likely caused by a vehicle strike with multiple chronicle chronic illnesses, like in kidney disease, parasitic skin infection, and also lost a substantial amount of weight.

[00:04:20] Um, they made the decision in December 17, 2022, RIP is believed to be 12 years old and consider geriatric for mountain lions in the wild. There's a definitely a support, uh, as well. There's several paintings up in LA about, um, uh, it was also, uh, just a lot of just different kind of exhibits about P 22. Um, definitely inspired a lot of people. So they have a memorial going up.

[00:04:47] So if you're in LA, which we are the complete opposite 2000, something miles away, go check out this memorial, but P 22, uh, it's, it's very breathtaking. I've seen pictures of it and it's what should be put up on top of Graham mountain. I think the memorial, I think. Yeah. Another one in honor of mountain lions, you know, probably as P 22 would be the leader of the mountain lions.

[00:05:15] If we're out here in the, uh, Northeast. Yeah. Interesting. I think they, I think the real memorial is they, they give P 22 a real name. Okay. Yeah, exactly. That is actually true. I mean, really seriously, they couldn't come up with a name, you know? Yeah. And how much does that cost? How much is giving somebody like Jonathan, Jonathan already told us he, he merits three syllables. Oh my God. 22 doesn't even merit a name. What's with that? And they're giving him a memorial. So disrespectful. Yeah. That's true.

[00:05:46] What I want to know, I want to know if there are any named bears in the Catskills. Anyone, any black bears you guys know by name or that are known by name? I can't say. There's the one called Holy shit. That's the one on plateau. Yeah. Holy shit. And I think there's another one called that motherfucker. Right. Do you know that one Stosh? I think I've run into that motherfucker before. I don't have any bad names for bears. They haven't done anything to me.

[00:06:15] Well, these are just the ones I've heard other people call them. Okay. That's, that's. No, no. I mean, I mean, I guarantee, you know, we've heard down in Woodstock, they probably have those names for bears because people, of course, aren't just leaving their, leaving their trash everywhere. And the bears are domesticated. You know, you go down into the Hudson Valley as well. And like Tad said, he, he's riding his bike and all of a sudden there's a bear in a trash can with his ass hanging out. And he's just like, what's up, Billy? How you doing, bud? Yeah. And they all take off when they see you. Yeah.

[00:06:45] Yeah. No, it's just, I guess it's something. I don't think we have any named animals out here in the Catskills. Well, we need to change that. And Jonathan maybe will help us. He can help us form a committee to go around and, uh, you know, come up with names for. Name the bears. Yeah. Famed animals and mountain lions. Cause we have a few of those in the Catskills too. Yeah. A few settlers. Yeah. We, Stosh and I last year, we started a whole new program in the Catskills called Cats.

[00:07:15] C-A-T-S. It's the Catamount Adoption, uh, stewards, no, uh, Catamount Adoption Trainer Society. So we're adopting cats, training them. We're kind of official accepting donations. Yeah. And we're going to give each mountain lion a real name. None of this P-22 crap. Correct. Correct.

[00:07:45] So each mountain lion has a name. Each mountain lion has a donor. And, you know, once again, you gotta, you gotta keep track of that mountain lion in the Catskills. Cause it's apparently mountain lions are everywhere. They see them all the time. Like in their backyard, there's these awesome photos of just a blurred object moving in the background, or there's this amazing photo that someone say, oh, I saw a mountain lion jump in front of my car and it stayed there for 25 minutes, but I couldn't get a picture. Yeah. And Jonathan, this is all, this is all BS.

[00:08:13] Everybody, there's no mountain lions out here. There is. But what, what I don't understand, how is it that this famed mountain lion P-22, uh, was able to survive and, and found it to be a suitable habitat out in a densely populated area with highways, et cetera. And, uh, Western California. We don't have them ostensibly don't have them in the Catskills when it's very rural.

[00:08:41] You know, we have wild forests and things like that. And we don't have any mountain lions. You would think they would come here. True. True. With a nice little area instead of polluted. Especially we're going to give them some bad-ass names. They ought to come over here. Correct. Correct. All right. All right. So, yeah. Uh, moving on. We have, uh, in Wyndham, there's a, the planning board moves forward that the mountains clubs, luxury hotel pan.

[00:09:08] So the Wyndham mountain club had a luxury hotel plan going up and it was like four, it went up for what review over in Wyndham a couple months ago. And you know, Ted and you and I talked about this. And now as of September 3rd, Thursday, board chair, Alicia, uh, Yager member and Nate Holderts and alternate Jay O'Neill passed the resolution determining that no further environmental review was needed for the project. Um, there are only three board members to vote on the Wyndham, uh, related proposals.

[00:09:38] Because three others must recuse themselves because of ties with the club. So the proposed boutique hotel was announced earlier that the amendment to the club's master plan, the hotel and four bedroom villa would replace eight townhouses off resort drive that were approved of part of the plan. Now this is a great thing. Now they say president Kedgen, Kristen, Kristen Leach said that the hotel would be a step above

[00:10:06] existing luxury hotel options with room prices ranges 1000 to $1,200 per night. That is a yikes. So this comes up into renewed concerns from John Flanagan, CEO of Wilder Hotels, but it's down the street and the plan could negatively, negatively affect other businesses in the Wyndham area. And then also joined, uh, while there was several hotel owners like, uh, Lisa Leslie and Maria

[00:10:35] Lehman of, uh, Albuqueror, um, Algera hotel. I haven't heard of that one. Uh, Christman's Wyndham house and then the East wind hotels and union post hotels as well. A lot of people opposing of this, but they go through of it. So it's just, it's just, I don't know. It sounds like Wyndham, uh, mountain club wants to take over Wyndham and tell everybody to get the hell out. You know, by the way, I'm on a planning board here in Massachusetts.

[00:11:04] So I feel the sting of this. This is, uh, very interesting. Um, it's yeah. So Jonathan being on a planning board, uh, a local planning board, that's a very like local, um, community board. Do you ever feel pushed back? Like when you're going out for your morning coffee to a deli or grocery shopping from local other local community members? No, no. They'll come to the meetings and yell at me there. Yeah.

[00:11:32] But not when you're getting your coffee, your bacon, egg, and cheese. No, people are pretty respectful. No, you know, that part. No, I have never experienced harassment. I mean, maybe. Well, you're going to tonight. Transfer station. What's that? You're going to tonight experience. Yeah. But you know, thinking about this in all seriousness, you know, because, um, usually when I stay in the Catskills, I'll stay in or near Wyndham or East Jewett, that, that area.

[00:11:59] And it just seems to me that this is just thinking the wrong direction. Like if I were thinking about revitalizing the economy and the Catskills, I'd rather develop resorts for the middle class that ordinary people could afford and get lots of them, hundreds of them coming up here, thousands of them coming rather than catering to what? 25 really rich people? Mm-hmm. How is that going to work? Yeah. Well, I'm in along that point, Jonathan.

[00:12:25] Uh, I really don't see a lot of damage to the local economy. If you're going to build a hotel with 25 rooms at a thousand dollars and up a night, because how many other rooms in the area are at that price point? Okay. So, you know, the, yeah, if this is just a, an incentive for, uh, local entrepreneurs

[00:12:49] to fill that gap between, you know, this high end and the low end and come in and make, uh, rooms available because, you know, I can't see if I'm going to spend a thousand dollars a night. I, I doubt I want to do it skiing Wyndham mountain. Not, I've skied. That's pretty funny. Yeah. I've, I've skied many days there. It's a, you know, for a Catskill mountain, it's, it's a decent mountain, but yeah, but, uh,

[00:13:15] to drive here and throw down a thousand a night, you want to know something I take, yeah, I take five or $600 of three nights worth of staying up here. I'd take five or 600 bucks. I'd fly out to Denver. Exactly. You know? Yeah. And then go up either to summit County, go to Aspen, go to Vail, you know, Or go up to fricking Vermont. Yeah. Or go to Vermont, you know, especially in the spring, do some spring skiing in Vermont where it's, you know, fantastic, but a thousand bucks a night at,

[00:13:46] and at Wyndham, you want to know something Stosh? These people, if you're, if you're lame enough to spend a thousand bucks a night to go ski Wyndham, God bless you. I mean, you know, I, I, I agree. I agree on your both sides. Jonathan, I like, I like your style. You know, once again, I am not upper class. I'm nowhere near that upper class. I don't even think I'm middle class. I'm lower class. So me affording places like, you know, the Airbnbs are just going up the hotels and stuff

[00:14:15] like going up, seeing, you know, some of us that, you know, would like to go up and do like maybe peep bagging, you know, up here and, and Wyndham and stuff like that. And having a good place to stay is a good way to go. But, you know, I don't think they want to, for some reason, they don't want to cater to people like us. Cause we're. Well, there's no, there's no money. If you build one of these new places, uh, can 25 units, can you really make your money back

[00:14:42] at $500 a night or 250 a night? I don't think so. I think that's what you build, buddy. Yeah. What you do? Seriously. You got some face everything in Italian granite and all the other two months, you know, you can build something humbler that for, for a humbler crowd. And I, and I, I don't deny the right of the private property owners to build what they want. And the planning board's responsibility here is just be sure that their plans are consistent with the laws and regulations, period, period.

[00:15:12] We don't evaluate the merits. We don't judge good or bad. It's just like, does your application conform to the law? Yes. Then it's approved. It's, it really is that basic, but I'm just saying that from a aspect of economic development, you know, I just love to see the Catskills turn in a way that becomes popular for ordinary people. And I just see opportunity there, you know, uh, servicing that crowd, because I think there's

[00:15:37] a need and a hunger to get outdoors, find someplace beautiful that isn't a long haul from the city. Yeah. Correct. Correct. Yeah. Once again, uh, Wyndham Hunter, you know, down in Phoenicia and stuff like that. They see people, uh, I mean, Phoenicia doesn't see the super rich down there. I don't know if the super rich has ever gone into that Phoenicia market there. Tad. The mystery spot. The mystery spot. Yeah. You go foraging in there, Jonathan. I imagine like.

[00:16:06] I am proud to say that I have floated down. What is it? Usopis. Is that the name of the river? Yes. Yep. And I still have what they call usopis toe. Cause I broke my toe on one of those rocks protruding in the water. Cause you can't steer those damn things. Right. So, so anyway, after, you know, my, my usopis river trip and I dried off, we got to go to the mystery spot, which is, you know, if you're going to Phoenicia that you really can't pass that up. Yeah.

[00:16:31] And, um, I left with a t-shirt with a red dot on it and, uh, you know, $3 lighter. No, I, I've always said that if I were to buy a place in the Catskills, I'd like to live in Phoenicia. You got good pizza. You got a good beer cave. You got, you know, the downtown's got a little vibe. The old antique store or antique co-op in town is like a mini, you know, art museum. It's got pretty cool vibe, but you know what?

[00:16:59] There's a lot going on in Phoenicia without the kind of fifth Avenue appeal that, uh, is going on over on Tinker street and Woodstock. 100%. Yeah. I agree with that. Sweet. Same here. All right. Well, we'll, we'll keep everyone updated with that luxury hotel plan. And, uh, you know, Ted, we'll have to, you know, I bring this up real quickly. You know, uh, Kelsey brought this up.

[00:17:23] Uh, apparently the house at the end of moon hall road is up for sale. So if you want to donate to the podcast now is the time. And the minimum we are accepting is $500,000. Yeah. Uh, we are going to get ourselves a new studio over at the end of moon hall row. And we're turning this into a hikers hotel hug hikers, luxury boutique area as Evie charging.

[00:17:51] We have water, we have outdoor patios. So it is being sold right now at, I think it was $4.1 million. Yeah. Well, we'll low ball them. We'll come in. We'll make an offer of maybe three, nine. And so that way amongst our 16 listeners or it works out when you fees and commissions to about 500,000 a piece. So, you know, now's a good time to get a second mortgage on your home, cash in on your 401k.

[00:18:20] You know, the stock market's going to implode any day now with all this AI stuff that's going on. So just, yeah, just tell them to wire the money over to Stosh and I, because at the end of moon hall road, we're developing what will be known as camp Stosh. Nice. I like it. Nice. It is once again, $4.1 million. Anybody wants to know what the, that house at the end of moon hall road is where you can't go on, check it out on Zillow. I'll have a link. I'll post the link.

[00:18:50] So it's really cool. All right. So in the town of Santa Clara, Franklin County. So dad put this on for a little bit of fun. September 4th, 839 PM PM. Ray book just passed, received a call from fishing Creek campground about an aggressive person smashing a truck with a sledgehammer. Force manager Fouts and Odell responded along with New York state police at 936 PM. Ranger Fouts and New York state police disarmed the subject.

[00:19:18] New York state police interviewed the subject and determined there was no arrest. Offenses since the damage was done to the subject's own vehicle. Family members picked up the camper. The incident was clear at 1224 AM. Jonathan, what do you think? You think that guy was out foraging and got some bad mushrooms? Wow. It must've been some really bad mushrooms. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. No, actually I see what happened was he went out, he couldn't find anything and he was so infuriated.

[00:19:47] He took it out in his car. Yeah. Yeah. Cause, cause people before him, like just over, over harvested the areas. Um, yeah, that's crazy, man. Somebody with a sledgehammer. Do you approach a guy like that? Stosh? You go, you, you like, you finish a burrows range traverse. You arrive at the Woodland Valley parking lot. And there's a guy there with, they hear, they say a person, I'm assuming it's a guy

[00:20:13] with a sledgehammer, just banging the crap out of a vehicle. Do you go over? I'd ask if I could join. Yeah. I'd be like, let the anger, like this is like anger management right here. Well, they have smash rooms. Did you know that? You can go to places. Yeah. It's pretty, it's a crazy idea. I have a smash room. My wife calls it my home office, but I call it this. Yeah. How many laptops have you gone through? I don't know if it gets the wall. You son of a bitch. Hold on. Let me, let me count.

[00:20:43] Yeah. No, I mean, I find that, uh, funny. So it just very, once again, we need more information that needs to have more information on what was going on. If the person was hired. Honestly, what more? I mean, uh, an aggressive person smashing a truck with a sledgehammer. That's about all you need to know. What is you? Yeah. So Jonathan, this is what happens in New York state. Yeah. They give out this information and there's no other information. So everybody's left curious of what what's going on and it disappears.

[00:21:12] So what are we going to do? We're going to enter a foil request and find out why that person was smashing their car. And we will bring it out to the public because this is like, come on, you cannot say that this person was later smashing their own car and you can't be curious of why. So, so Stosh, I did, you know, and I wasn't going to bring it up, but you have brought, brought it up. Why was he smashing his car?

[00:21:36] The story I heard as he was triggered because, you know, we had all of our listeners up at the, uh, at a Rondacks hiking this past weekend and he was triggered by the intro music to the podcast. It is, it is heavy. Made him aggressive. Just made him aggressive. He grabbed a nearby sledgehammer and just started beating the crap out of his truck. Cause he thought he was in a mosh pit. Hey, I don't blame him. It's a good intro. It gets you pumped.

[00:22:06] Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope we don't get sued. I just hope we don't get sued. Okay. I got a good lawyer. Yeah. Trust. Do you like more on how those are attorneys? I like them. Yeah. I like them. So, uh, last set of, uh, shooting the shit, uh, SUNY New Pulse student facilities research team wins DEC contract to study imperiled montane birds in the Catskill high peak. So the New York state department of environmental conservation, they awarded an $80,000 contract

[00:22:35] SUNY New Pulse research team led by associate professor Kara Belinsky. The team has studied montane birds in the Catskill high peaks where increased foot traffic and off trail hiking threatened the wildlife habitats. Researchers are counting bird species to measure these impacts. Preliminary data shows bird declined near you, the high use trails, and the findings will help shape DEC visitor policies. Well, that's a good one, Ted.

[00:23:02] I'm glad you brought that up because how long is this research going to take like it did with the informal trails? Well, what I find remarkable about this is I didn't put up the photo. I should have put up the photo because it showed the crew that's part of this, uh, faculty research

[00:23:24] team, which is one professor, five students, $80,000 to go hang out in the woods for what? A few days. I hope not. Do a tally of birds. That's like over $12,000 per person. They're getting paid. So if they go up four days, that's like $3,000 a day per person to count birds. I hope they're doing this extensively for 80,000.

[00:23:54] No, no. For $80,000, you think you and I could go and put trail blazes from the burrows range over the dink to Friday balsam cap, Rocky loan into table for 80 K. True. Actually, I think we, I think you and I could, we could come in under 20 and leave 60 for some of the other places like, you know, uh, for and big Indian, you know, that contract maybe could go out to Joanne beyond blazes.

[00:24:24] You can do that. And maybe out to South double top. She can get that for like 15. Right. I mean, it's $80,000. Now, why do you have to continue counting the birds? We all know that the population is dwindling. True. How much more confirmation do you need? And what we also know is that this trail network is out there and in some areas, maybe it's consolidating is the beaten path becomes more beaten in and easier to follow, but still

[00:24:53] in the winter, you could go with blazes up there and in the fall, it might be harder to fall, follow with freshly fallen leaves. Why, why don't they just spend some money and put trail places out there and stop studying? They're going to, they're going to be done studying it when, you know, they're going to what, build a monument for the last montane bird. I think it's P 23. The last bird. P 23. Yeah.

[00:25:20] I mean, Jonathan, do you know about montane birds like the bicknell thrush? Not a damn thing. Okay. So they're mountain birds. Montane, they're up there high. Yep. My altitude birds. Correct. The bicknell thrush is on the decline that we've noticed for the past, how many years, Ted, did they say 15, 20 years? Yeah. Are they ground nesters? Yes. Yes. Oh, there you go. Yeah.

[00:25:46] So now if we have these peaks over 3,500 feet that are trail less, you know, they say these, these trails are trampling over the birds and stuff like that, where this is, I wouldn't say that this is the, the informal trails are killing the birds and stuff that these birds have been noted that they've been on decline ever since these informal trails have been even out there. So now they're doing this research and they're kind of blaming the hikers on the decline of the

[00:26:13] bicknell thrush and stuff like that, that we've been muddying over, stepping on their nest and stuff like that. When it's not fucking true. Like, sorry to say that, but we, we have our hikers are seriously, you either go off trail and you, you know where you go and you avoid that stuff or you know where to avoid, or you follow the well-impeded herd path and there's no birds there. If the birds are nesting in the middle of the herd path, they are stupid birds and they

[00:26:42] should be learning them not to do that. Well, I just, I also think it's the proximity of human foot traffic and the noise of people coming through that kind of makes them a little on edge, especially when they're nesting and on the ground with their offspring, their, you know, their eggs and whatever, you know, they're recently hatched. I forget what they call them, but. Fledglings? Fledglings. And so that's why Jonathan's on here tonight. You'll make me look good in a dire moment like that.

[00:27:11] So, you know, I, I can, I get the whole thing with wanting to consolidate foot traffic for a lot of reasons. You know, you can study it all you want. Climate change is a big factor to this marginal winters, big factor to this. It's time to stop doing habitat studies and to spend some money either marking these trails or just come out and say what is noted at the end of this summary.

[00:27:41] The DEC is going to use the findings to help shape visitor policies. And what does that mean? Does that mean marking the trails or saying nobody gets to go up there? I mean, what's, I mean, what are the, what's the third alternative? Either you mark the trails or you tell people they can't go up there. They're not going to say we're going to leave it as it is. Right. Why are they spending more money studying then? It's one or, it's one or the other.

[00:28:10] We're either going to mark the trails and consolidate foot traffic to these summits, or we're going to tell people you can't go up there anymore, or you can't go up there in the month of, you know, May and June type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Don't let's stop. We already know the researchers there. Why spend $80,000 more to do the research when you can build a good bridge over the never sink on slide. Right. And I also think, I don't care what you do.

[00:28:39] How do you really count birds on the top of these mountains? How do you know you see the same bird twice? Well, that's the number. Yeah. I think if these people, or if you're going to hire anyone to go up there to count birds, the first thing they need to do is like, go and count rats in a city block in New York City. And if you can count the number of rats in a city block in New York City, or cockroaches in a city block in New York City, then you're qualified to go and find all these birds up in the Catskills. Right.

[00:29:08] It just seems like an impossible task. I don't know how they're going to do it. All right. That's it. That's enough of my rants. I want to get down to, what are you drinking? Oh, well, let's go over to the, those monthly supporters. Yeah. We'll go in order, but I'm just going to help you move it along now. Okay. Okay. So let's thank you. Big thank you to the monthly supporters, Chris Garaby and Eric Rosario, Oskana Nichols,

[00:29:33] John Comiskey, Mikey S, Desert City Radio, Henry Burmeister, Vicky Ferrar, Jeff Jotz, Betsy A, Denise W, Vanessa Jim C, and David Oliver, who probably doesn't listen to the show. Actually, I talked to him. He actually listened to the show, Ted. And he said, he did like a hyper drive of listening to four straight hours. And I'm like, did you ever listen to the part of where I did? I said crap about you each and every episode. He's like, I missed it. I'm like, you didn't listen to him.

[00:30:01] So he's still not listening to him, but I love him. I thank him for supporting the show. So just like Molly from Outdoor Chronicles Photography, you need to capture your love story with breathtaking backdrops with Outdoor Chronicles Photography. Molly specializes in adventure couple photography and show immortalized your moments amidst the stunning landscapes of the Catskills, Adirondacks, and White Mountains. She'll craft timeless images that reflect unique bond in nature's grandeur.

[00:30:28] Embark on an unforgettable photographic journey with Outdoor Chronicles Photography. Don't hesitate to get a hold of Molly on all platforms. Also, discover the wilderness with Trailbound Project. Their expert-led hiking and backpacking education programs offer unparalleled outdoor experiences. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned adventurer, join us to learn essential skills, explore stunning trails, and connect with nature. Start your journey today with Trailbound Project and unlock the wonders of the great outdoors.

[00:30:56] So, Ted, you were talking. What am I drinking? Why are you asking so much? Are we jumping ahead? Are we going ahead of one? Oh, okay. Well, geez, hold on. Yeah. So- Let me get ready here. Jonathan, I chatted with you quickly about this. So, I mean, if you- So, do you want me to reference what I'm drinking here or what I drink when I'm in the Catskills? What would you prefer? Whatever you want. All right. I mean, I always like to talk about beer. So, I don't know that much about it, but I still like to talk about it.

[00:31:26] So, we'll go. You guys first, and I'll leap in when you say it's appropriate. Okay. So, Ted, you haven't done this in a while. So, go ahead and crack it. Yeah. Well, this is- We'll see if these $50 therapy co-pays are really working. Nice. So, that was the first time in a long time he's done it with his right hand, correct? Yeah. So, congratulations, Ted. Yeah.

[00:31:52] And I've got, I got like beer all over my iPhone to prove the power that I now have. Just went right across my desk. Me as well. Excellent. Excellent. Sounds good. So, yeah. Ted, what do you have, sir? Hmm. Well, I got to taste it first to make sure it's legit. Yeah.

[00:32:16] So, I kind of like started exploring the Equilibrium brewery and its offerings. And so, tonight I have their fluctuation double Indian pale ale coming in at a robust 8.1% alcohol to volume. Yeah.

[00:32:40] And the way they brew this up, you don't know it's that potent. It's just so smooth. Kind of has this floaty, pillow-like finish in your mouth. Yeah. Yeah. These IPAs, these high test IPAs have kind of been a staple of my non-prescribed therapy

[00:33:06] over the past several months that I've been dealing with this shoulder injury. So, highly recommend Equilibrium IPAs. Double, triple. They got it all. Whatever. Whatever. Jonathan. No, no. Let's go with Jonathan. Let's talk about his stuff. All right. So, I have to say that my standard beer when I visit the Catskills, Jenny Cream Ale, baby. That's my go-to. Wow. Nice.

[00:33:36] You're going old time. And you know what? I love that beer because, you know, look, it's a light fizzy lager. No kidding, right? Mm-hmm. But it has a nice finish. It's got a great mouthfeel. You know, it's got just a subtle touch of lightness, of sweetness, I'm sorry. And it doesn't have that awful bitterness at the end that a lot of the inexpensive, you know, lagers you often have. So, that's my go-to, regular. But when I'm in the skills itself, there's a brewery I like to go to.

[00:34:04] You guys have probably talked about it before. The Westkill Brewery? Oh, sure. Oh, hell yeah. Oh, my gosh. Not only are the beers delicious, but the view is just unbeatable. I mean, you can't. It doesn't get better. I mean, it's just incredible. Wonderful place. I will agree. Yeah. Yeah. Jonathan sounds like our kind of guy. Yeah, definitely. He knows what he's talking about. I mean, Jenny, like, I've never heard anybody describe Jenny as that. That's like, it's all the whole thing.

[00:34:34] Usually, it's just like, yeah, I drink Jenny. And then- I probably haven't had one in 40 years, but I grew up in southwestern New York, and that was kind of like a staple of our existence. I was going to say, that's a stomping grounds. Yeah. When you were in grade school and you went through the lunch line, they either give you a little carton of milk or Jenny cream in the green can. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, cool. Cool.

[00:35:01] Tonight, I am having a, it's called a bombshell, hearts, apple cider, raspberry. So this I got from the Hudson Valley Wine and Food Festival, 6.5 IPA, IPA, alcohol by volume ABV. And it is from, I think it was, where did I look? New, New Hampton up, up near the Finger Lakes. So delicious stuff.

[00:35:31] You said 6.1? 6.5. I thought we had a rule on the show, you can't bring anything on below eight. Isn't that a rule? I'm trying. I'm trying. I don't, the hard ciders don't come in. Math is not one of your skills. How can you afford this place on Moon Hall when you can't even count up to eight? That's why I get these little ones that are there. Okay. So you can drink twice as many. It's starting to make sense to me. Okay. All right. So moving on, let's talk about who was really outdoors.

[00:35:59] So mention the podcast, one of your hikes through social media. We'll chat about it on the show. Tag us by typing at ITL Catskill MTM podcast on your post. Once again, sorry. Forgive me if I missed anything because Instagram has a weird way of notifying tags and stuff. Like I will see a tag or somebody will attack me and I will not know. So I try to get everything. So of course, try to get all of Scott Catskill MTM. The brew was all over the place.

[00:36:27] Went up to back up to the Adirondacks and did big slide. And then the, did the Dick's range with Janie, Danny, Joanne, and Steve, then did upper Wolf jaw with Danny and Joanne, as well as flags in 46. That was pretty cool. They put flags up on the 46 high peaks as well up on the 48 peaks up in New Hampshire. That was pretty cool for the remembrance of September 11th. On his rest day, he did balance rocks and pitch off mountains for his seventh LP Niner.

[00:36:53] And today he tagged us saying he completed his LP Niner on hurricane with Danny and Steve. So somewhere in there, I might've missed something. So forgive me, Scott. Catskill MTM is killing it. And we probably soon to be see him doing his 46 because it's just, he's knocking off peak after peak. It's just unbelievable. So follow Catskill MTM if you want to know anything and everything, because he has been out there within the last month of New York state. So it's crazy.

[00:37:24] Speaking of Steve, environmentality did Cascade and Porter for number one or number two in his high peaks quest. And then also did Mackum for number three on his 46 or dicks and that list. And then did South dicks for number four, then did balance rocks and pitch off mountain. And then finally did the McIntyre range. So Steve is up there ripping it up as well. Danny mild mischievous did upper wolf jaw and he tagged us in a bunch of other stuff as well. I think avalanche lake.

[00:37:52] He did with, with, with Catskill MTM brew. I mean, he didn't tag us like an everyone like, like, like Scott did, but Joanne tagged us, was up there doing some stuff as well. She just loves to tag us with just a post of a picture or a video. And I have no clue where they are. So it's, they look like they've had a great time up the Adirondacks. Great weather.

[00:38:17] I am getting very jealous and I am getting very antsy to go up there and, and do some peaks. So thank you everybody. Uh, Serena Marie 46 or did five laps and that's not a typo up on cane mountain and climb Cusaraga mountain for flags on the 46. So not a typo five times up and down the mountain. So crazy. Yeah. Serena. Yeah. Amazing. Tracy. Ooh, excuse me.

[00:38:46] Tracy pink pony 18 was trolling up an upper Lake wild center. So she was up there with, when they brought, I think they brought trolls up there and stuff like that to, to be on display. Really cool. Like massive side of trolls. I think they travel all around the United States. Jonathan, have you ever, do you know about this? I don't, but I think if I came across a giant troll in the woods, that would be express train to Brown town. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's, it's a little thing, but you got to, you got to, you got to,

[00:39:16] it's a little bit of a little bit of a play. Some people love it. Some people don't. That's pretty weird. So she had a good time up there. Andy Brownski, uh, as we all know, was, uh, on Lake Tia potty, Tia potty, Tia rottie, Tia rottie.

[00:39:43] some crazy wins on the presidential traverse she also did hail and kerrigan and that was when her friend steve zang completed his new northeast 115 congrats steve yeah that is an amazing accomplishment uh that guy is is a constant hiker in the catskills he's leading hikes for the 3500 club so big shout out to steve zang awesome uh and then she went out again and did slide bear pen

[00:40:07] and fly she's at 27 of her 48 new hampshire high peaks and then is chipping away at her grid so cammy thanks for tagging the show really appreciate it you've been kicking ass uh brad labradante was up on bear pen and fly hopefully enjoying the views that are going to be limited soon jeff jotson orlo in the new jersey highlands trail when the last time they were there they were going through 12 inches

[00:40:32] of snow now they took a swim in the lake amazing cool to see chrissy g was at the minnewaska mohonk preserve looking at the beautiful cloud formation that looked like the catskills off in the wood shaw and did balsam and eagle enjoying the end of the seamen blooms and also did hunter's field mountain i suggest a lot of people go do that this part is the hundreds highest correct hunter's field yeah yeah

[00:40:56] okay over there yeah and it's pretty cool terrain over there on hunter's field um it looks like it's an old plant most of it at least the western side looks like it's a plantation forest yep oh no yeah what is it is it red pine what kind of do you know what kind of plantation i'm going to say spruce spruce yeah they have a lot of those over in the northern part of the gatsgills pishka hunter's field

[00:41:23] letters hill stuff like that is a lot of plantation and they're starting to tear them down south mountain up there if you want some great views go up to south mountain up by hunter's field they've been tearing those plantations down it's pretty crazy tad why is that because of invasive species logging logging i could i couldn't i couldn't tell you the thing let me get reach out to james my friend james hobson would probably know because he hikes up there all the time but i think it's just logging

[00:41:51] i don't think it's invasive not yet not yet what maybe they're planning so that's good so uh sean off in the woods sean did balls oh it's uh valgo's hiking went up the famous huntington ravine trail over in new hampshire got her info on that she said it's a great time it's very fun and very challenging but a super fun so if you know how to do kind of like uh type two fun yeah be able to

[00:42:18] do that that's kind of veil veil's idea of fun is what most people call suffering correct correct i think it's just largely the attitude she brings to it so very very cool that's a epic hike glad she had a good time definitely definitely it's good to hear it's good to hear people are all over the place uh rob the sloth trance went up wittenberg and is hiking for suicide awareness so

[00:42:43] check out the sloth trance and go to his page for donations uh for suicide awareness greatly appreciate what you're doing rob that's awesome uh samantha d the broke trail hiker did smith in redfield for number 32 and mike her companion did number 45 so he is close to doing his 46. so congratulations samantha and samantha also did that video of her cracking open a beer or a

[00:43:10] awestruck on the summit and that was epic yeah tagging the show i think she started a new trend i think yeah yeah we should get everybody doing that maybe we'll talk about it a little bit later on but thank you samantha d for starting off what is going to be fun yes correct all right uh james john o'boil did the northville placid trail and he continues uh to post about his days on there days one two and

[00:43:40] three looks like a great time great muddy time uh joss at orsas compass did southwest hunter and russ with some new shoes that he'll be using for his devil in a day this week so looking forward to hearing joss for your devil in a day definitely looking forward to that i will probably never do that in my lifetime so have fun uh mike at red hand adventure guys was up on red hill enjoying the rain in the morning

[00:44:05] being an awesome steward and had a beautiful breakaway skies in the afternoon and then i went in on a 20 mile bike ride on the dnh rail trail so cool cool cool scott catsville mountain brood did giant and rock peaked for 43 of 46 so he only has three peaks left looking forward to hearing about that scott cruise outside uh was at what looks like balsam and eagle hiking for the

[00:44:29] alzheimer's association so sam uh didn't tag where she was but i'm guessing it's eagle so but she's hiking for the alzheimer's association so check out her page if you want to donate and last but not lease oscana catskills ever after did fur big indian eagle and balsam and i might have missed the blackheads that she did last week so she did the blackheads as well forgive me oscana but she had an

[00:44:54] awesome time so total tad uh so that's 21 hikers tagging us wow and yeah and many of them did several hikes so that's a lot of hiking activity reflected in that list everybody's getting out and trying to enjoy the last time last set of summer that we're having and it's starting to get chilly so but enjoy enjoy thank you for all for tacking that's what greatly appreciate so once again we talked about

[00:45:24] this before there is a house going up for sale at the end of the moon hall for 4.1 million dollars we need people to donate their 500 000 uh funds to the podcast so we can get a new studio and everybody can come in and enjoy live shows brews tad and i will cook for you what the hell why not yeah so well we'll make um our own private walkway up to wittenberg via the van ben shoten that'll become our

[00:45:53] private trail of course true true so check that out on buymeacoffee.com and also rate the show if you can on any platform and we will check it out so ted you got a new segment oh yeah so as we mentioned with um samantha dean earlier she uh was ingenious enough to take to the summit or uh crack it open and

[00:46:19] tag the show so if you post a realer story of you cracking open a summit cider or brew and tag the show we'll give you an extra loud shout out during our recordings just note that you must be 21 years old or older to enter and consuming alcohol can impair your ability to descend from the summit be prepared

[00:46:45] to spend the night correct and we are not held responsible yeah our lawyers do we hike more and how will defend us to the end of the world if you sue us because you got lost out in the woods after having a summit brew and tagging the show so we're not responsible we're not responsible for anything

[00:47:08] anything at all including it's all sam's fault yeah all samantha's fault all right so excellent cool i mean hopefully maybe somebody will do it uh how about previous hikes jonathan let's go on with you what do you've been up to these past couple weeks you want to chat about it for previous hike i know you're you're busy on the weekends talking about you know forging fungi cats and stuff like that over

[00:47:33] massachusetts you know the thing is my hikes would be so boring to you because when it's mushroom season if it's if the mushrooming is good i don't get very far you know what i'm saying even with the groups of forays if it the mushrooming is good the walking is slow and once your basket is heavy you want to return you know turn back so most of that i'm trying to think what have i done recently

[00:47:59] that was actually kind of interesting um that's still interesting what the heck are you talking about what are you doing over in massachusetts oh well uh well i let's see today i was in the create a town called a beautiful name loonenberg loonenberg moon moon town uh and we have a place called lane property and that's a really nice mixed woods of you know hardwoods and conifers lots of moisture and damp and

[00:48:28] it was a fantastic mushroom day today and i found some really weird stuff um that i'm kind of puzzled about like what the heck it is so that was kind of fun but um the really big news was i led a walk in born massachusetts which is at the very base of cape cod is the first town when you cross the uh when you cross the bridge i led a walk there and i found um an obscure amanita that apparently has never been

[00:48:55] identified in massachusetts before so i'm looking forward to the dna test and um the sample may end up in the farlo herbarium at harvard university so it's pretty exciting yeah pretty exciting would you name this would you name the sample p20 i can't it looks like there may already be a name so i don't get it it's not going to be cransy eye or anything no no okay no no not not that but yeah so it's been

[00:49:21] you know it's been um this has been so much uh so much better season than the previous two which are absolutely bone dry so uh it's been exciting it's been really good nice that's cool then and how many when you take these people out on these uh like expeditions stuff like that how many people do you have with you it depends you know typically it's around um 12 to 20 i've done larger wow and i've done

[00:49:49] smaller but you know if it's sponsored by a land trust and they have a pretty good social media presence look they'll turn out a pretty good crowd they'll turn out a really good crowd and they're fun and people are enjoyable on it love to learn yes they're all excellent and you know you got to think about they came there by choice right so uh they want to learn and yes we have a great time um and i think really what they appreciate too is that i don't just go around naming things you know i encourage people you know pick it up touch it what does it feel like smell it what does

[00:50:19] it remind you of what does it suggest and then we talk about its lifestyle what is it doing here what is it eating what is it contributing to the habitat or ecology of that environment and people really appreciate that because it all becomes a much bigger story absolutely god those are questions we could ask on that a little bit later so cool very cool i'm happy to

[00:50:40] revisit it yes nice nice so tad what about you what are you up to oh so i did my um weekly standard on saturday i went over to uh minnewaska it's not even 10 minutes from the house where i hiked in and over the course of about five and a half hours i banged out uh what is that 17 and three quarters miles so

[00:51:06] that's my longest hike since i hurt myself and uh i did just about 1900 feet uh hiking up to lake awassing around lake awassing up the castle rock trail to the high point points lookout and then retraced my way down it was uh you know the weather was interesting that day it started off early just really really royal blue skies very few clouds and then eventually the clouds started coming in and the

[00:51:36] haze started coming in during the day and kind of dampened that but interestingly as i'm hiking up to minnewaska state park proper i'm coming in on a an old access road and i'm coming up to where the schwangunk ridge trail crosses that access road and i see this trail

[00:52:00] runner um coming towards me and it's a really odd thing to see a uh trail runner trail runner especially with the bib and numbers on it on that trail and all of a sudden it occurred to me that uh ken posner in september does the schwangunk ridge trail run it's a big run i mean it's long a lot of participants

[00:52:25] and so this guy goes by me and i ask him are you doing the uh str run and he stops remarkably he's like 15 feet past me now and he says yeah i said well you missed the turn oh the trail oh yeah yeah so if if i hadn't put two and two together and stopped him that's where i said i climbed about

[00:52:48] 1900 feet but about 1500 of that feet was coming up the access road it's just bringing you in from 500 feet to almost 2000 and that's what he was starting to go down and so we yeah we he and i joked about it and i showed him where the turnoff was and so we went on his merry way but yeah that was kind of like one of the the funnier things that that happened to me that day and if you look at my instagram feed

[00:53:15] you'll see that there's just i mean you know there's viewpoints galore throughout the park um i've only been doing the carriage road i haven't been doing any of the foot trails so that kind of limits where i i can go but where i have been going it's really scenic i'm really grateful to be able to like get over there in a few minutes and not have to deal with any crowds in in the main access

[00:53:39] areas and do this so got a few more months probably of doing that before i start venturing back to more ambitious hiking in the catskills so that's all i got stosh would you nice you get the views and stuff like that i didn't i didn't do shit to be honest i went to do what so what is it uh i went on friday

[00:54:03] night i went to my old boss's cider and we did it jessica and i did a paint and sip because my old boss he was my store manager and he had a life-changing event and he stepped down and he he's been been making cider for a while and his wife is a great painter so we drove 20 minutes did a paint and sip chatted about life and how excited he is to actually live life rather than be the the corporate

[00:54:32] bot that they they make him to be so he's gonna have fun so we had a great time painting and chatting and then the next day we went down to the hudson valley widening food festival down in rhinebeck now i'm gonna say holy shit like the amount of people that were there is absolutely insane like i met todd there i got to see todd bold there uh and his wife suzanne yep i i said to him i'm like

[00:54:59] we're gonna be down there so if you guys like want to join in check it out and he's like yeah we'll come and both of us were like overwhelmed with the amount of people there and i'm just like you know i i should have expected this you know it's from freaking new york city's seven million people you know and it just as the day it's it's it's there's a lot of vendors a lot of vendors wine cider a lot of

[00:55:25] distilleries a lot of distilleries that i didn't know existed and uh just the amount of time you know usually at at like a wine and food fest even a local one you can like sit there and like talk with the people not at all not at this one so many people were flowing in and out and they wanted their samples and people wanted to talk with them they couldn't talk with them and stuff that it was just so crazy and i'm just like yeah i don't think i'm coming back to this so was was this held at the duchess

[00:55:53] county fairgrounds correct okay and in your uh ventures and roaming around over there um what was your favorite cider so uh this bombshell is really good that i got um i had a bunch awestruck was there i didn't we didn't get to see them but a lot of people were were trying their wines were trying their first

[00:56:20] ciders like you know they're they experimented and stuff with the ciders they didn't have it and they're like well we're gonna try this what do you think and the bombshell is really tasty uh i also i stopped at phoenicia and got some more but i didn't buy too much once again like the time you have to spend at this thing before you're kind of pushed out of the way to be real like uh is is very minimal

[00:56:45] so like my jessica and her mother were there with me i kind of like brought them down for this because they love the adirondack one the adirondack one is so laid back and it's once again you're chilling with the people the owners most likely and they'll tell you all about their wine they're what they've done and this is just like here take your sample do you want to buy no then please move on move on to the next one there's so many vendors so many wow so much stuff going on so uh if you want to do it check it out definitely cool if you like wine and you want to get free samples and then

[00:57:14] hopefully you have a drive home uh i i cut myself off i was just like all right i gotta stop like this is too much so a lot of there's a lot of delicious wines i gotta admit most of them are up in the from the finger lakes of course and the adirondacks a lot of the the harder wines are from the the hudson valley they have different kind of grapes and stuff different water that flows into their grapes but

[00:57:38] um i found it pretty cool it was a good drive we drove where we drove i took her her mom and jessica down plat clove to get down there yeah instead of driving through hunter and going to 23a i went down or 23 we went down plat clove and jessica's once again she's been down there several times she's holding on to the sides and her mother's just looking down like oh this is pretty and then on

[00:58:03] the way back we take beautiful uh 23a and go through phoenicia you know shokin stuff like that i bring them over the uh the reservoir and they're just staring at the burrows range and shokin high point and stuff and then we go into phoenicia i have some ice cream at the phoenicia ice cream shop is that what it is right right right next to brio's uh oh yeah yeah it's right behind it and on the

[00:58:30] opposite side of the parking lot yep uh we had ice cream there and then i was just like i kept twitching and i'm just like i gotta go over to the phoenicia market i gotta go in the beer cave so went over there and i got myself some ooh orchard hill i'll hide that on next week orchard hill from down in lexington yeah so great time beautiful beautiful drive back uh so does that uh wine and cider

[00:58:56] festival continue this weekend or was it just a one weekend only gig one weekend okay and it was you guys anybody who wants to do it they gotta wait till next year but what we're hearing is if you go expect it to be like a new york city subway car 100 dude uh and you know we're like jessica and her mother you know i've been downstate uh you know i lived in long island for a little bit i've always i've gone

[00:59:23] downstate new york city stuff like that i know how the flow is i know how to adapt her mother is not used to this kind of high traffic and she's like wow everybody's rude i'm like that's the way it is it's new york city like just swerve inside out bump into someone say you're sorry just keep moving on like it's just the way it is like and you know the high flow of traffic everybody's got to adapt to everybody that's how it is so yeah like she was it was it was funny to see that and i'm just like

[00:59:50] well it's the way it is so so that was my my thing i was i shouldn't have blabbed that was too much blabble on so anyway uh so if you want to volunteer check out new york new jersey trail conference 3500 club catskill trail crew catskill mountains club visitor center jolly rovers trail crew bramley mountain fire bramley mountain fire tower any fire tower and also if you need free

[01:00:13] stickers get a hold of me or go to camp catskill also the 3500 club is looking for volunteers to help install boot brush stations around the catskills get a hold of the 3500 club by email or through their their e or their uh webpage to get a hold of them to help install boot brushes around the catskills

[01:00:36] pretty cool take away invasive species i like that yep yep all right so let's get into the insanely inaccurate weather forecast the best kind spin the wheel exactly exactly here is your weekend

[01:01:00] weather forecast sorry i'm in a hotel room on the road so i had to record this in a hotel so check out by your side outfitters check out far and high outdoor co for your awesome catskill stickers use the code word inside the line it'll get you 25 off everything in the shop and they can use the code as many times as you'd like once again check them out for your classic catskill stickers like the

[01:01:28] 3500 elevation sign the catskill sand canisters or the catskill foot trail signs check them out 25 off use the code word inside the line at barn high outdoor co on etsy dot com so here is the forecast on friday september 18th is looking really good in the catskills morning temperatures will be in the

[01:01:51] upper 40s to low 50 in the valleys with the summits around low to mid 40s expect partly sunny skies light winds and a little chance of rain by afternoon valleys will reach the upper 60s and around 70 while the summits stay in the 50s to low 60s on saturday september 19th looks like another great hiking day temperatures will start out in the low 50s in the valleys to the upper 40s and low 50s on the summits

[01:02:18] expect sunshine early with clouds building later with light to moderate winds and only a small chance of precipitation afternoon temperatures should reach the upper 60s in the valleys and around 60 degrees on the high peaks expect a great day to be out on sunday september 20th expect a little bit of a change cooler wetter day with the morning temperatures around 50 degrees in the valleys to the mid upper

[01:02:43] 40s on the summits rain is expected at times with cloudy skies and temperatures reaching only the low 60s in the valleys and the low 50s on the top of the high peaks winds will be out of the north so it can make it feel a little bit cooler on the summits definitely bring rain gear if you're out today so once again you're being out be safe be prepared and don't become tomorrow's rescue story

[01:03:08] back on the shrooms boys all right so let's get into the last set of sponsors and then we'll finally get on to jonathan so discover camp catskill and tannersville your ultimate hiking store find top quality gear apparel and accessories for all your outdoor adventures their expert-led staff is to help every hiker from beginners to seasoned pros they also carry a unique variety of souvenirs and gifts

[01:03:35] visit us online at campcatskill.co or in the store to gear up for your next journey adventure starts at camp catskill also embark on a transformative journey with another summit another summit is dedicated to serving veterans and first responders with free outdoor activities activities like walks in nature paddling hiking and even backpacking join our supportive community to rejuvenate in nature's

[01:03:59] embrace we experience camaraderie adventure and healing at no cost take your next step with another summit and ascend to new hikes of resilience and joy apply today on another summit.org all right so let's get on to the guest of the night so tonight jonathan kranz joins us to talk about mushroom walk and talk so jonathan is big into mushrooms fungi forestry stuff like that as well

[01:04:27] uh and he is here to chat about the the fungi and and mushroom population we have here in the catskills john i met jonathan we'll take it back a couple months over on thomas cole mountain when i was doing my trail maintenance uh the trail sisters told me that there was a guy up there named jonathan that he is an awesome time and he was teaching them about mushrooms that they didn't know that existed in

[01:04:56] about five minutes that they saw him so i was like awesome i'll go up and chat with this guy he looked at me grazed at me once and then went back down to his mushrooms and said hi we had a discussion all about this mushroom i learned i learned that his name was jonathan and then all of a sudden he went in to talk about this mushroom just everything about this mushroom he goes dissecting it taste it spits

[01:05:22] it out said this is toxic this is not good and i'm just like this guy's awesome let me get down his information so i got his information and now we have him here on the show tonight so thank you for joining us jonathan oh what a pleasure hey so so do you know the trail sisters have they been guests on the show they were our last guest or two guests ago unbelievable so here i am um i don't even know the name of the trail you would know the name of the trail but it's on thomas cole mountain um and and i'm

[01:05:49] i don't know i don't know how far up i am but oh i'm immersed in the mushrooms and i'm looking around all of a sudden there's a commotion this how many were there like 12 of these women and they're not just walking they're running and then they pause and i'm like and i don't know how the conversation started maybe they're saying like what are you doing and i just started talking about the mushrooms and it grew from there and we had a grand old time and i ran it to you but i didn't realize that you had

[01:06:16] run into the trail sisters first yes so kelsey uh a good friend of ours is a friend of that is in the trail sisters and we had kristin back on the show christy back on the show two episodes ago to talk about the trail sisters so basically the same time that uh you and i chatted and we gave into information i did the same with the trail sisters actually i kind of forced myself to tell christy like hey we need to get this going we love the trail sisters we love ladies of the cats so that's

[01:06:46] that's amazing once again uh as they said to me like they they stopped with no hesitation and they said that guy above you is talking about mushrooms and he knows his shit like get to talking with him you need him on the show so i had to that's so cool all right so so jonathan once you give a little background about yourself go as you want and such uh it doesn't it doesn't matter do what you want

[01:07:09] all right i'll take advantage of this well i was i was born on an island manhattan and for the first five years of my life i i lived in washington heights and i'm very proud of that so uh apparently around the corner from the alde audubon ballroom and um columbia university etc uh then i grew up in new jersey and you get a couple beers in me and i sound like tony soprano but for since 1990 i've lived

[01:07:35] in massachusetts uh lat for the last 30 years i've made my living as a marketing copywriter writing websites and content and junk mail and emails all kinds of obnoxious stuff that you hate getting well i'm calling time out yeah go ahead man you you say junk mail should we all think spam mail no i haven't done no no no no so um one of the differences almost my almost my entire career has been business to

[01:08:05] business so consumer spam no i would never i i didn't do that stuff now that's not because i'm virtuous is because no one put money in my hand and told me to do it so okay gotcha that's it's that's simple really all right so you can roll the film forward with the life story i will i will so so so so you probably want to know uh so so today again i'm now 30 years of writing and i discovered

[01:08:34] mushrooms about eight years ago i started and uh i took a one-week identification program at a place called eagle uh what is it in steuben steuben maine called eagle hill institute they do a lot of natural history education and it was a one-week immersive where every day we had a little classroom work a little field work and then some laboratory work we're identifying what we had and it was just an

[01:08:57] extraordinary experience and really the foundation for uh the stuff that's come later so now with this like uh identification class that you had to take and such did you have to do a lot of research and stuff or was this kind of hint of the activity that they taught you no it was uh it's a campus where you live on campus you eat there actually the food was phenomenally good it was fresh uh local uh sourced

[01:09:22] and uh you stay overnight and then every day the class would get together and as i said you know we have like a lecture format so we didn't have to do like research per se into like monographs and stuff and it was led by two experts one of them is the uh poison said poison identification center's mushroom guy so when there's a mushroom emergency he's the guy they call and twice that week during class

[01:09:47] he had to take he had a separate cell phone just for the poison control service it rang twice wow and then yeah that's really it and in fact one of the times he says hold hold on and he actually asked he invited all of us to identify what mushroom we thought it was putting this person on the spot for embarrassment and i'm just thinking on the other end of the phone is going near death they'd be like well you know

[01:10:19] let's give a little bit more uh information can you give us a little bit more of what's going on with you now like uh with with that like was that was that a call to to the catskills because we've had several instances instances within the past eight years about that oh in the cat in this in caskis do you know what the do you wouldn't happen to know which mushrooms were the source would you by any chance

[01:10:43] no no no it's we've had some crazy incidences where some people have been high on mushrooms oh oh yeah so i don't i it's probably some edible stuff so of course of course yeah typically uh sillasabi mushrooms and orienteering really don't mix well you know that's so um with this you said the past eight years what about your experience as a park ranger like when

[01:11:12] did this come about yes in in boston for two seasons 91 and 92 i was a park ranger for something that doesn't exist anymore the mdc the metropolitan district commission and i was a ranger on george's island in boston harbor and the chief attraction there is uh fort warren an enormous seacoast fortification one of the biggest the the only two that are larger

[01:11:37] are fort adams in um newport and the one in fort jefferson down on tail end of the keys in florida beautiful place wonderful job but uh pay i think uh peak pay i think was 670 an hour and so i i couldn't stick with it uh but i love the work i love doing interpretive tours of the of the fort for for for visitors that was fantastic no it sounds like an awesome job it was yeah but

[01:12:07] it didn't pay well so you you moved eventually on to mushrooms and foraging how did that come about what's yeah well that certainly wasn't for the money what's that so what what sparked your interest it's in 92 93 is when you're the park ranger and then right so we have to fast forward like 30 years yeah wow so so you you go 30 years more or less and then all of a sudden you have this hankering to learn

[01:12:33] about uh mushrooms well and foraging sure brings that about an immense poverty or something else no uh i was in london in 20 march of 2018 and uh without going into too many details i had an experience that uh i could describe as psychedelic it almost sounds like something we want the the details well

[01:13:02] it's okay tell us what you want well yeah maybe a little later we'll see how it goes but okay a few more beers one thing to understand is that i was completely sober that's what made it so interesting and so when i returned home i was trying to make sense of what my experience like what what happened to me what's going on and someone had suggested a book by michael pollin called how to change your mind

[01:13:27] and in that book he dedicates quite a bit of time to psilocybe psilocybe mushrooms what they are what the experience is and uh i was intrigued by it but i thought to myself you know if i'm going to explore this path i really want to do this right i want to understand mushrooms in general i want to get to know it a bit before i go down this road and what happened by total surprise is i completely fell in love with it

[01:13:53] i just loved the mushrooms uh i had joined the club the boston mycological club and i loved it so much that when i heard of this opportunity to learn more about mushroom identification in maine i said yeah i'm gonna do it you know i took the week off in uh it was the first week of august 2019 drove up five hours uh up the coast up route one to steuben maine which is about uh 20 minutes north of

[01:14:19] acadian national park that's the best way to describe it yeah beautiful air god you guys would love it it's it's unlike anything i've seen because those those it's almost like those little finger fjords that go into the water the terrain is just so crazy and rocky and weird um beautiful state gorgeous i mean and we're talking i was just on a little teeny tiny fragment of it and there are mushrooms everywhere i mean it was just incredible

[01:14:45] you couldn't swing your elbows without bumping into a mushroom it was just a fantastic experience so anyway uh i'm still working i'm this that and the other but in the clubs i i develop enough knowledge where i've been i was asked to volunteer to lead walks and i started doing walks for the club and then a couple years ago i thought well why don't i make some coin from this there are groups that probably be interested in these mushroom walks and that's what i started doing so today i lead

[01:15:12] mushroom talks largely for libraries these are indoor presentations with a powerpoint about an hour and a half and i talk about the basics of mushrooms and talk about mushrooms you're likely to see in massachusetts is where i am and i also do mushroom walks which are confined to the season which is pretty much july through october and most of those will take place on week weekend days for obvious reasons it's the time when people are free to go on these and so this is my second full big year

[01:15:40] of doing these talks and walks impressive thank you so you enroll in this um class up in maine and i take it during the course of the week you're there you successfully identify at least one if not more than one what i'm going to call edible uh mushroom and and how did that feel was there like a sense of

[01:16:05] accomplishment uh pride how about total the first time i identified and ate a mushroom on my own i have to admit there was sweat on my brow yeah am i 100 so i mean you know that that first time that first time can be nerve-wracking right you say okay i've done all the study i've done my homework i've checked i've double checked and then you just got to go for it yeah and uh so there was yes it was

[01:16:35] exciting ted but also it was a little nerve-wracking yeah were you by yourself were you solo doing yeah because obviously i was not going to feed this family the first time no right so not that wasn't going to do that um and so so you know it was something i made a little dish for myself i don't even you know i i was probably chanterelles but i'm not 100 certain what with the first edible i

[01:17:00] i found it consumed and you you cooked them up and were they good was it worth it oh yeah yeah yeah they're really good yeah you know which brings us back to the catskills um nice place for chanterelles and they're delicious and god and his providence has decided that where there shall be chanterelles in the catskills there shall also be wild mountain time what a perfect combination oh yeah perfect

[01:17:29] impressive wow and it's right there reach out go out the door those lovely purple flowers just pick up the leaves oh my gosh it's just fantastic and it goes beautifully with chanterelles yeah and how how do you cook that combination oh really simply so one of the things i recommend doing uh and the and the chanterelles one of the mushrooms i suggest doing this is dry sauteing them before you put the

[01:17:53] mushrooms into the recipe so you have your pan you get it hot don't put any oil or fat or butter in it when it's medium hot throw your slices of mushrooms in there with the chanterelles you don't have to cut them you can break them apart uh like like string cheese like mozzarella right so you have your sections throw them in the hot pan what's going to happen is within seconds you're going to start seeing water come out let that water cook out till the pan's almost dry at that point you have two

[01:18:22] options you could take the mushrooms out put the fats in and then your garlic your onions etc and then return the mushrooms to the pan or you just keep in the pan throw in your olive oil or butter and then throw in your onions and garlic and spices etc now um if i'm doing a dish for for for for dinner i i might make a a wine cream sauce so i basically i do what i just described and then uh hit it with some

[01:18:49] that thyme salt and pepper then cook that for a little bit throw some white wine let that reduce a little bit hit that with some heavy cream serve that over fettuccine and we got a delightful meal you it's it's there it's done and it's fresh it's delicious and these people won't know that you got this from the catskills i think you got it from the supermarket not the chanterelles good luck finding those in the supermarket you know whole foods whole foods will sell them to you but they'll

[01:19:18] but at some outrageous price like 12 an ounce and then you pick them up and they're all kind of ratty and brown and old and you're paying top dollar for you you know what i mean they're genetically modified now whatever i don't know you know someone forged for those somewhere because they can't be cultivated right yeah so those particular mushrooms yeah yeah so uh as i was saying before i ran up to you

[01:19:45] on thomas cole so you say that you have been kind of going to the catskills for the past 40 years you want to chat about your 44 years so i went to ruckers for school and my roommate his family has had a cabin on thomas cole mountain since the depression wow many years since the depression small place on barnum road so that's where the trailhead is right you know so they have a place

[01:20:10] on barnum road and i first went in the spring of 82 82 that's like like fun like like did you go up there just uh like hang out and stuff yeah yeah it was uh easter break and we ended up just to have fun i say easter break which is supposed to be kind of spring-like it was never so cold in my life i mean but i i you know i distinctly remember we all packed into a van and we drive up there and we

[01:20:37] arrived in the middle of night and this is when barnum road was now or it was first of all a dirt road not paved and it was about half the width and we covered the canopy of trees and it was dark and scary and steep and we finally make it i remember breaking out of the van going out the back doors and looking up at the sky it was a clear night and i had never seen so many stars in my life

[01:21:03] i was and i was just taken aback because listen i i was growing up in new jersey there's too much light pollution you never see anything in the sky so i wasn't prepared for this we get out of the the van and like holy crap there really are stars out there i thought it was a rumor right and there it is it was just gorgeous yeah wonderful time and so since that time uh i've been you know through the

[01:21:28] young or through college and early adulthood i'd go visit my friend there and then we lost like we lost track for a long time but um the one of the good things of the internet was a great way to catch up with old friends and i guess in the mid 2000s around 2007 2008 i was able to reconnect with my friend and ever since then we my family and i have been going there to visit him and his family just about every summer wow awesome now up on barnum road that's that's an escape like that's

[01:21:58] a beautiful spot oh indeed it really is gorgeous yeah and to be honest you have one of the i wouldn't say most recent but one of the most the best trails going up to camel's hump and thomas cole that was well built within the past 15 to 20 years that that makes it kind of like a a fun hike up to the thing you up to thomas cole you know you have

[01:22:26] like switchbacks you have some steep sections going up the cloudy hole you got some viewpoints that are diminishing as you said no those viewpoints are diminishing that you used to know you know 20 40 years ago that but once again you you go up through here when do you start like noticing like the mushrooms and stuff like are you the past you say the past eight years you know you got digged into it like that's when you start what what is your your thought with the mushroom stuff going on in the

[01:22:55] catskills when you started digging into that skills are a rich environment for mushrooms uh because first of all you have mixed woods and that's great so it's not straight conifers excuse me it's not straight hardwood you got to mix mix is good uh they're not obviously these these woods are not ancient forests they're not old growth because everything was cut down for agriculture so this is a second or third generation but um it's been around for a while i mean it looks you

[01:23:20] know my guess at least you know depending on where you are 80 to 120 years since disturbance is my guess you guys would probably know better than i but that seems to be with the range and given that the incredible amount of moisture that you get you know the rain the annual rainfall plus the capacity of the soils and you know the clay soils to hold on to water and the richness of the leaf

[01:23:47] litter the duff layer you know you've got a lot of moisture you've got a perfect habitat for for mushrooms and their host trees so it's just a wonderful place to go and in fact one of the things i want to do is go in the fall because i've always been going in the summer i'd love to go now or even into october to check out the fall mushrooms which will be different species than the summer ones i saw you in the summer and like this was this was right after a recent i wouldn't say rainfall but

[01:24:13] they were they were oh it was okay yeah i remember they were just rain like two days before no seriously and they just sprout that within that amount of time uh many of them did yeah many of them had in that in that short amount of time and there were others that had already rotted by the time we got out there you know they they just waterlogged soggy moldy and that's it but there

[01:24:37] are a lot of there was a lot of good mushrooming that day a lot of good mushrooming so does location matter when we're talking about the mushroom population species stuff like that yeah absolutely it matters and is the catskills like a good spot for it certainly is a good spot it definitely a great spot and you should i give anything away i mean i don't know how discreet should i be here

[01:25:05] ah you know yeah you'd be you'd be guided by your own ethics in terms of that so i'm going to give a spot i'm going to suggest a spot that everyone's going to know but can sustain your audience going to look it i think it'll be okay do you know that uh caddis upper caddiskill falls you know the parking area upper caddiskill if you take the go to the right there's that rail trail that goes to the

[01:25:32] abandoned station yeah what is that that trails what a mile and a half between from that's the perfect mushroom walk because that's a three uh that's a three mile loop and it's good it's excellent habitat and because it's an old it's a rail trail it's nice and wide it can accommodate a lot of people and you can find mushrooms immediately in that vicinity you don't have to bushwhack there to

[01:25:57] find good mushrooms so that limits the amount of damage that people will do when they look for mushrooms because it'll be right there on the sides of the rail trails themselves so jonathan what are we going to find along that walk like we're going to find some laughing gems along you might yeah i didn't see them the day i was there i didn't see any big laughing gym so for those of you don't know big laughing gym is one of the few common uh mildly hallucinogenic mushrooms available in the northeast

[01:26:26] most of the psilocybe that you hear of really is west coast pacific northwest uh california redwood forest slim pickens in the northeast it's certainly where i live however the big laughing gym which is a genopolis junius uh it's a big orange brown mushroom that creates an orange spore print um it's i have never tried it but i've heard it's a mild psychedelic it's not full bore like uh you

[01:26:54] would get with psilocybe but it's incredibly bitter i don't know anyone who can get past the bitterness it's it's rough rough rough going yeah while we're while we're on the topic of bitterness hallucinogenics edible yeah let's let's dive right into uh edible talk and tell us um particularly somebody like me who's

[01:27:22] according to my wife i'm just inherently lazy is there a smart smartphone app that's uh reliable and safe to identify mushrooms and fungi that i can go out in the the woods with take a few snapshots yeah you could try i naturalist lowercase i uppercase you know i naturalist i don't have to tell you right i'm sorry so you can try that um i would just say just just i would just ask everyone to remember

[01:27:50] this every one of those apps depends on the collective intelligence of the millions of people who use the internet you trust your life with those millions of people no okay i trust my life with someone like you and uh so what i would say is this i think ted i think it's a great tool to get you started so take get it get its advice then double check it against a good book or a reputable website like mushroom

[01:28:18] expert.com for example that's a great website double freaking check because here's the thing i want you to think about this how many orange mushrooms are out there hundreds okay so you take a picture of the cap and if they're just going by the cap without looking at the underside the gills the stiper stem at

[01:28:44] the base without information about what it was growing in or on man that's that's something they're going to arrive at an identification with minimal information and that just frightens me a little bit but i would say for you look use it as a starting point but not necessarily as a conclusion is that fair yes and so what what other than you know i i would use i naturalist just as a kind of like a

[01:29:11] curiosity tool to get some information but if i really wanted to get into foraging and eating uh presumably edible mushrooms uh what would be the way to segue into this and get deep into it in a way that's uh not likely to cause harm to myself okay the first best way is to join a club true that is

[01:29:41] the best golf club country club no no there are mushroom clubs throughout the country and you know i should have done my homework and and googled is it if someone one of you could do it right now see google cat skills mushroom club and see if something comes up i'd be surprised if something didn't because given the the richness of the mushroom environment and the cat skills and i can't believe anyone missed the opportunity

[01:30:09] to do that but the reason mushroom clubs are wonderful is that they typically sponsor walks usually every weekend through the season with the exception say of labor day and independence day you get to meet fellow enthusiasts many of them are very informed and almost always they'll have at least one expert on each walk to do the so-called table talk at the end to say what do we have here there's no faster way to learn because unlike learning from you know flashcards or a book when you're out

[01:30:38] there in the wild i mean you get to hold the mushroom you can smell the mushroom you can get a sense of its heft of its texture of its weight there's just no better way to learn and of course all that's going into your sensory in your memory all that sensory data is going into your memory and helping you reinforce what the heck that is and you'd be surprised but i'd say i'd say a couple things so the club is number one join a club that's that plus they'll have webinars they'll have events they'll have parties they'll have

[01:31:04] dinners it's it's a lot of fun and typically it's like 20 a year come on it's a i mean it's it's it's a it's no-brainer i can recommend a book to the complete mushroom hunter by gary linkoff gary linkoff is uh the late gary linkoff was a new yorker also so that's another plus in his column he was the president of the new york mycological association for many many many years and the author of multiple

[01:31:29] mushroom books including the complete mushroom hunter which i recommend is great for beginning foragers and even includes recipes so good stuff nice uh the other piece of advice is focus on the easy ones first the ones that are difficult to confuse with potentially toxic or uncomfortable mushrooms like for instance chicken of the woods it's a shelf mushroom that's bright orange on the top

[01:31:58] top top bright yellow on the bottom hard to confuse with anything else that's a good mushroom to know easy to see when it's out there that's a good beginner's mushroom the giant puff ball which you find on lawns or parks that's a great beginner's mushroom the the key here is cut it and make sure it's pure white if it's white it's all right if you start seeing it turn yellow or brown sporulating it's no

[01:32:25] good it's too old so the big ones the calvacea gigantica uh the large puff balls that's a good easy one black trumpets which are little black guys are floral and thin they're more for flavoring then you can't really make a meal they're too thin to make a meal out of but they are excellent for flavoring uh soups and stews and i use them with chicken cacciatore but that's a great beginner's mushroom because although

[01:32:51] they're difficult to see because they look like dead black leaves when you do see them they're easy to identify and there's nothing else that looks like them so it's a safe mushroom for beginners and when you dry them out they'll get you through the winter you can just jar them up and and you're going to have them uh all year round um so so jonathan yeah when i when i saw you on thomas cole like you were chatting

[01:33:19] and all of a sudden you picked up this this mushroom out of nowhere and you're like hmm i'm going to check this out and you took a nibble of it and you put it like on the tip of your tongue and you said something it's like you like like oh and you're like oh no and you spit it right out what what were you doing that that day it was like it was toxic or something right yeah so so let me back up a moment so i want

[01:33:44] to explain to you to your listeners that regardless of toxicity all mushrooms are safe to touch and handle you can't get poisoned by touching a toxic mushroom you can't get contact dermatitis in fact you can even taste and the key part is and spit out the and spit out part is the important part taste the mushroom spit out uh and without harm and that's because the molecules that are poisonous are too big to pass by

[01:34:11] osmosis through our tongues and our cheeks you have to swallow them to get poisoned so taking a tiny bit and tasting it can give you a clue now sometimes what you want to do is you want to taste something nice and you go okay great this is a safe mushroom other times you taste it for acid or bitterness so what i was looking for is i probably picked up a large white mushroom that's almost funnel shaped and i my guess was it was a mushroom called lactarius piperatus and so i took a little nibble of it if it's the

[01:34:40] piperatus it'll be burning hot not subtle burning like battery acid and that's what it was i just yeah it's not like a hot hot hot spice it's a freaking battery acid yeah it is so it's not pleasant like oh you saw like hot sauce no no no no no it's it's more like a nasty acid that's that's a little extreme

[01:35:04] so so jonathan just jumping back you mentioned sorry chicken of the woods yes or what is it most commonly mistaken with in our region is there anything that's similar to it or when we know that's why i recommend it because there's nothing else that looks like it you boy you'd have to work really hard so what i would say to your listeners just look up on the web and just check out some pictures first and you're going to see there's nothing else now there are other mushrooms that are orange

[01:35:31] but they're going to be capping stem around these guys are shelf mushrooms so they don't have a stem underneath they grow off the sides off a a a standing snag or or or fallen down you know tree trunk and again what you want to do there is you want them fresh if you're interested in eating them you want them fresh you don't want to see olive or gray colors in there that's bacteria cut that out or walk away and you also don't want them dried out i mean just just use your common sense use the same common

[01:36:01] sense you would use in the produce aisle in your supermarket you know what fresh is same common sense in nature if it doesn't look fresh leave it the freak alone right there's there's a reason why my wife doesn't send me shopping what about uh morels you haven't mentioned those yeah are they common to the catskill no so now so here's the story about morels morels prefer sweet soils you know more uh

[01:36:26] more alkaline than acidic so in the northeast it's pretty slim pickings for us they like the midwest where there's a lot of limestone so in those parts of the country with lots of limestone they get morels and the morel season is early it's the middle two weeks of may typically in in most places in massachusetts where i live there are just a couple of pockets where you might find a morel or two for

[01:36:52] instance i live um in northern central massachusetts which has the nickname apple valley so the apple orchards used to be limed they would spread limestone to raise the ph but also not far from me is an abandoned limestone quarry with an abandoned limestone kiln so there are some remnants of the lime that are in the soil so it's a little sweeter and they can be found typically uh with elms is number one but most

[01:37:19] of them have they're dead ash trees okay so you're looking for so for those of you looking for morels you want to go to a place with limestone with dead or dying ash trees in the middle of may that's what you're looking for so we don't in where we are you're not we're not morel rich where we are okay it's like morel could that could be located up in more of new hampshire and stuff like that because

[01:37:49] they have limestone up there correct do they oh you know i know whites i know vermont there's a seam of uh uh there and you maybe and the answer is maybe i just don't know i mean once again i'm not i'm never i'm to be honest i'm never going to touch a freaking mushroom and then try to eat it i have no unless i have a professional person right next to me that's going to be like like the jonathan like you you know like when you seriously were on thomas cole and you were just like let me test this out

[01:38:15] and you're like you're like oh now now this is a and you spit it out yeah stash is like oh my god i might be carrying him on a stretcher down this mountain you know like i have to call a rescue squad this guy's going to be i am the barfing all over the place right yeah i got i got the needle to go into your side and be like got him and i'll haul you out trust me exactly the narcan yeah jonathan what about chaga do we have chaga in the catskills i should i you know i haven't seen it but i'm

[01:38:43] my my guess is sure you would so for those of you uh oh you know i was about to take pick up a piece of chaga remember this is a podcast not a video cast sorry chaga chaga looks very much like a wood burl and most many people will confuse to say oh that looks like chaga it's just a wood burl so here here's how you're going to know chaga grows on birch trees if it ain't a birch if it's an oak

[01:39:12] it's a maple it's something else it's not chaga that's number one number two is chaga on the outside looks like charcoal it looks like something that's been burnt it's very ragged irregular and black but within the cracks you should see an amber color for the tissue underneath and like an amber orange brown color that's the meat of the chaga now chaga's weird it's not a mushroom

[01:39:40] it's what they call a sclerotium it's a it's a a biological unit that's there to store sugar so the actual body of that fungus is hiding underneath the bark of the tree where you never see it we just see the evidence of the sclerotium they build to store sugars for i guess future growth or against the winter or whatever i i don't know enough about the physiology

[01:40:04] but chaga is reputed to have medicinal properties anti-cancer properties uh if you've i don't know you uh does either are you familiar with the russian author alexander solzhenitsyn in the 70s he wrote a number of books about the gulags in the soviet union and he was a very well he was one of those guys as writers on the bestseller list that more people bought the books than read them you know what i'm talking about yeah yeah i have plenty of those books myself oh yeah oh yeah i'm sure many

[01:40:33] people do i'm sure they're collecting dust on someone's nightstand right now from you know 30 40 50 years ago anyway sojanitsyn was in the gulags in in in siberia and he came he got stomach cancer and you can imagine that the health care wasn't that great but the locals told him about chaga tea and he swears that chaga saved his life i don't know if it's true it's anecdotal but he swears by

[01:41:00] and many people do so chaga is one of the fungi that are being studied for its potential medicinal properties by the way it's delicious it's delicious yeah it's delicious if you like dark chocolate if you like coffee if you like those deep bitter flavors you'll like chaga so birch trees birches like white birches in particular okay birches yep and you guys know where to find white

[01:41:25] birches right you mean absolutely okay i thought you would yeah we've got a few yeah we've got we've got a you know once once again you know tad you go up uh what's it called uh mink hollow you get that whole birch uh population to the left uh going up in and ending that uh sugar loaf and such and it's just it's sweet birch black birch okay yeah yeah i get plenty of that right black birches

[01:41:49] the the black black birch tad you are familiar more with that i'm not black birch i don't think we well i think the caskills are yeah the caskills are kind of a haven for birch trees they're all yeah that's what i thought there's all different kinds yeah yeah you see you see a lot of them on the southwestern slope of plateau you you go through birch grove after correct grove

[01:42:13] climbing up through there correct so yeah jonathan as we move on to like uh like mushrooms beyond mushrooms real fungi what can you tell you about your expertise on fungi what's that what you can what what's that your your expertise on fungi you know i i don't i i i hesitate to call myself an expert because i i know better i say look i'm i'm an enthusiast i share what i know with others but

[01:42:40] because i know experts and i have so much respect for them that i know that i ain't one of them you know i these are some serious dudes in fact there are these so some what happens to people who are interested in fungi well some do become academics and they do research and they have labs and in universities and and that's that's that's true but then there's this odd subset of these mycological nomads who go around kind of like you remember the movie endless summer where they just

[01:43:09] chase the waves going just around the world you know where the waves are in the summer there are people who chase the mushrooms around the globe so for instance our where we live in the northeast our season's july through through through october right pacific northwest northern california their season is the winter that's their good season for mushrooms so you'll see people that come to the northeast for the summer then they're flying out to the north you know off to the northwest

[01:43:37] there's a guy i know noah siegel he's was a child project prodigy who's now the author of multiple mushroom books he's absolutely brilliant he's in he's in alaska right now doing research and his own stuff and sometimes you'll find he's out in tanzania in africa i mean there there's a whole little there's there is a subculture of these wandering geniuses who go looking for mushrooms all over the

[01:44:03] world and they are crazy and wild yeah when are you going to join them i'm too lazy man i like my creature comforts i i mean i love reading about the rainforest and watching documentaries but the idea of being in this hot humid jungle with snakes and poisonous centipedes and stuff i'm like nah i'll stay at home and watch the documentary and enjoy a beer

[01:44:31] you know that's that's good enough for me so so jonathan i know you you travel a lot over to the bottom road area thomas cole stuff like that uh are you familiar with like slide mountain and stuff i'm not tell me about it uh i would i would suggest you go to slide mountain and check out the the mushrooms up there because that is considered a rainforest yeah they consider that a rainforest because of the amount of precipitation it receives per year is over what 60 centimeters uh ted is that

[01:45:00] with the yeah it's like that county county is that the same county or is it or different is that columbia ulster county ulcer okay ulster county yeah yeah it's uh the highest peak in the catskills and uh once again it's considered one of the few rainforests in the northeast uh that because the the rain it can see it receives per year is over 66 inches yes i i'm getting viscerally excited yes it sounds

[01:45:26] magnificent yes there's there's so much more out there john jonathan you got it yeah you got to move around buddy because you know i do you know that's the truth i i i and i definitely want to i i definitely want to it's it's a big place there's a lot of different terrain and somebody like mike kudish uh a really well-known catskill forest historian will tell you uh there's just a lot of diversity in the

[01:45:52] catskills uh particularly with you know the glacial deposits the different soil types throughout the catskill park i'm going to assume from what you've told us so far hey that when you go from one place to another you're going to find different mushrooms based upon not only the type of trees growing there but also the soil composition it's ph yes but you know what i just realized i made a mistake because i just don't wait what about limestone the catskills wait a minute you got that

[01:46:22] how caverns you know what i'm talking about yeah for and yeah yeah cobleskill yeah so that's got to be limestone you don't get caves and granite i mean you know or slate that's got to be limestone so you know what in that area there might be more else i mean i don't know i haven't been there i haven't done the research i haven't looked but it occurs to me now wait if there's limestone there there's hope so there

[01:46:47] could be there could be more else but again you want to go out mid-may mid-may so the the whole uh area from rosendale new york into kingston and beyond going north towards albany there's a big seam of limestone oh and that's yeah and that's where rosendale cement came from the stuff that they made the brooklyn bridge out of nice nice so i would imagine through that area there must be a ton of

[01:47:17] morales and isis you could could could be and everything you know all so much depends on the host trees yeah gotta have those host trees right yeah i so i a couple summers ago um i was hiking uh up the escarpment and i ran into a couple two people who were out foraging and you know it's kind of for me it was kind of interesting to have been hiking for a few hours not to see anyone during that

[01:47:46] time and then all of a sudden the people that you do see all you see is like their butts up in the air right their shoulders are down their heads are down to the ground and they have like these canvas bags with the handles of the bags over their necks and just dangling off their necks and their hands are down just picking up stuff and this guy he was so proud to show me what he had accumulated in his

[01:48:12] canvas bag and he said they were morales i didn't know what time of year was it it was i'm gonna say it was um late july and i i say that because i'm associating it with the reason i really went over and struck up a conversation with the two of them is i was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes that day and i didn't have

[01:48:37] any lethal bug spray but i figured for these people to be stationary where they were foraging they whatever they had it must have been like you know carcinogenic that it was so potent and so i went over to them and sure enough the guy saw that i was just like getting eaten by all these mosquitoes yeah he waves to his wife he's like honey come over here he needs bug spray and they have like this industrial bug spray they sprayed me i started to get like

[01:49:05] sores on my body because it was so lethal but at least the bugs didn't bother me anymore yeah but yeah he said they were morels and that's why when you said we don't have them in the catskills maybe you know i could stand corrected i i could stand corrected you know i'm puzzled that's interesting i'd love this so i'm gonna i'll give i'll give stosh the coordinates for where i ran into yeah i'd love to know more about that yeah and then maybe you can go over there and you can find your honey hole

[01:49:31] yeah of uh but i i would encourage you to investigate other um edibles and go beyond the morels my friend because you're gonna have a much more satisfying time finding things that are more common and that you really can find frequently yeah so so other than what we've covered so far as uh the mushrooms of abundance in the catskills the chicken of the woods what is the next one of the next things

[01:50:01] that uh a beginning forager should put on their list to seek out and find in the catskills i think it's worth getting to know some of the boletes and the boletes are the soft cap and stem mushrooms that when you flip them over they don't have gills on the underside they have little holes called pores behind the holes are tubes and then the tubes that's where the spores are produced and

[01:50:29] released there are many fantastic edibles within the boletes and i'd say you know it's worth getting to know some of these the classic one is the king the king bolete the porcini the stein stein pilts in german it's got many names it's officially called boletes edulis and it's worth getting to know because i think the catskills probably does a good job of producing these stash what i'm what i'm hearing is

[01:50:57] um unlike mountain lions mushrooms have really cool names i mean jonathan's not saying you know like z24 or find yourself some x 29s right they're all you know pretty cool stuff um so but then when it's complicated then you start getting all crazy and stuff like that and then you start hallucinating well but it's just like just like with mountain lions you know you come across the wrong mushroom you could

[01:51:23] die i suppose yeah but i better be involved with p22 than the hallucinous monogeninous that like yeah but did i say that right or that could i put an extra h in there and all of a sudden it's it's something that's deadly so yeah p22 is it will be in my life forever so yeah uh as jonathan when as you move on you know we talk about uh you know once again chicken the wood stuff like that is there anything

[01:51:49] like when when you're out you know and spotting and stuff like that like do you see like you go bushwhacking off and you can spot this like you'd like goddamn batman you can be like oh oh oh and then you'll start running off and see what is it that that draws your attention that out in the woods random middle of nowhere that you can bushwhack to to spot that you love to see that you love to experiment with well obviously the ones that are brown are going to be really hard to see from a

[01:52:18] distance so the typically the ones you can spot from a distance are the brightly colored mushrooms so chicken of the woods would be for instance an example of they're like it's like uh the spinning lights on a cop car i mean they're really obvious i remember the first time i found my first batch i was coming up a trail with a little bit of elevation and i was approaching the top i could see just over the crest of the hill in the distance i see the sun it was like like you know the clouds

[01:52:47] part and it's a religious painting there's a shaft of light it's hitting this trunk of a tree and there it is glowing orange and yellow they're the chick in the woods right unmistakable and sometimes it happens you walk along and you turn your head into the side boom there it is because it's so brightly colored so that's one and the other one i'm gonna i already mentioned it the chanterelles and that's something you know you look at uh public property publicly available property and you're looking down that like ravine or the goal you know like a little down the slope and you see

[01:53:16] that that beautiful yellow orange color and you go wait a minute now if that isn't a leaf now it's a july it's a little too early for the leaves to turn that's worth investigating and here's an important tip i want to share for everyone who's listening you find one mushroom get down on your knees get low to the ground take a deep breath and look very carefully around you often you find one

[01:53:42] when you let your eyes adjust you'll see the others around them be careful the other thing to look for especially in the mountains we have a rich leaf layer right look for the mushrooms pushing up through the the the duff you could call we call them mushrooms where the mushrooms are kind of pushing up the leaves as they're trying to break out often that's your best sign there's a mushroom there you know it's it's trying to break through the leaf litter so look for those imperfections in the level of the leaf litter

[01:54:12] where wherever you're headed nice nice shows that you have kind of like a uh direction aim for this type of stuff like as when you when you kind of like start off and you progress do you do you feel that you've gotten like better and better and better and better at it or do you feel like you're still like one of the rookies compared to no i feel i've gotten better i feel i've got it it just takes a long

[01:54:38] time not just the identification but getting a sense of where the mushrooms are likely to be and that's a very inexact science but i can tell you um oak trees are your friend if you know a place with lots of oaks that's definitely a place you want to investigate oaks have more fungal associates i think than any other family of trees so look for those oaks conversely maples are not great and i'll tell you

[01:55:07] why maples do have fungal associates but the fungi that associate with maples do not create mushrooms they do not create fruiting bodies that come up above the ground that fungi remains underground and reproduce is underground so maples don't support any mutually symbiotic mushrooms around them maples only become valuable to mycologists when they're dying or dead and then you get the decomposers

[01:55:35] on them most famously the oyster mushroom loves sugar maples you guys have plenty of sugar maples right i mean you have to it's the freaking catskills gotta have tons of sugar maples yeah down in um the uh solomon county yeah and going into the western catskills yes so i would say when you talk about what to look for an easy mushroom for beginners i like the oyster mushroom they'll be coming out uh

[01:56:02] around now and through the fall even through the winter you can sometimes see them during warm spells in the winter i've seen i've seen oysters covered with snow and ice so i would say for your to people listening uh you know those old farm roads where they're aligned with those old sugar maples come late september october even through november you want to be checking the sides of those those sugar maples you may find a nice treat there so jonathan i i go out foraging i get my uh foraging

[01:56:31] sack or basket or whatever it is if you will chocked full of what i believe to be edible mushrooms so many so it's more than i can eat in a night or two what do i do to save or preserve the excess okay um if you think you're going to be eating them soon you can refrigerate for a couple of days so that's

[01:56:56] the first cut refrigeration if not then you got to make some choices and so there are a couple things you can do one is cook the mushrooms then freeze what you've cooked so freeze after cooking not before cooking because if you freeze them the expanding ice just breaks all the cells in the mushrooms and they turn the mush and they're garbage right but if you're cooking them you're displacing a lot of water anyway and adding other things and then you can freeze what you've cooked that's that's another

[01:57:26] option a third option is draw and and this depends on the mushroom some mushrooms don't work well with this others do you can dry them uh the boletes are particularly good for that the king bolete the porcini is as a beautiful mushroom to dry uh or dehydrate i have a dehydrated but you don't necessarily need one you just need to cut them into thin slices put them out on newspaper on a large table or surface

[01:57:51] and then take a fan put on the lowest setting and just have the air constantly blowing over them overnight you'll know they're done when they're crispy that's how dry you want them you don't want them bendy i mean freaking dry like chips that's when you can put them away now now the advantage of drying is twofold it's one it's um you're preserving it but a lot of people believe that you're actually

[01:58:17] concentrating the flavor you actually get better flavor by drying them and reconstituting them than you would if they were fresh in in some instances in some instances yeah so jonathan before we moved on you you mentioned something that many of our younger listeners are probably not familiar with uh what exactly is newspaper mention tell us what that is it's quite that is savage so i gotta bet i gotta bet

[01:58:45] you're you're not wrong you're not wrong yeah so there's a time when you get the news your hands would turn black from the ink that would come off the newspaper right got you wrong so your your well informed colleagues had like black fingertips and those who were just kind of like ad-libbing through life you know had cleaner hands i get it okay oh my god yeah that's a good point you know yeah

[01:59:10] you know that's that's funny you brought in yeah you know that's an awful thing too because i do these walks and talks and sometimes i make references and i realize my audience doesn't know this reference like for instance uh there's a group of mushrooms called the inky caps and as the name suggests they produce a black ink they actually self-destruct they melt from the bottom of the cap up they release a black ink and inside the black ink are their spores for reproducing so i'll make a joke and i'll say you know the

[01:59:39] inky caps are the mr phelps of the uh fungal kingdom i'm like mr phelps you know like mission impossible like you know this tape is going to self yeah yeah and i realize i'm just i'm older than you know toast i mean who was that uh tom tom cruise did one of those didn't he yeah i've heard yeah he in the remake right right i gotcha but you know i'm at i'm at that age my friend where my references are

[02:00:06] 23 skidoo you know just in the past yeah listen man saying i'm i'm 44 years old and some of my stuff uh with this podcast i'm i'm wondering how it reaches some of the people that listen to it like i'm just like man like they're half of my age but they're off doing five or six peaks in one day i'm just like god damn like that is amazing how do they still listen to this because of the history it's

[02:00:34] because people like you jonathan that join us yeah that gives us the the information that you know we don't we don't see once in a while like you know it's it's great to get out once again to get done with your local you know your fungi place or your mushroom place to learn about this stuff you know well i have a thought and look if this episode becomes popular and you get people interested maybe we can organize a walk sometime in the catskills i would be delighted to do that it would

[02:01:04] take a little some logistics i'd have to do some organizing to clear a date but i would be very up for that i'd be very up for taking you know leading the walk in the skills you know i think that would be a delight yeah up barnum road you know i would love to do that that's one spot there's another i can't damn it i'm so bad at remembering names you know at the base of barnum hill when you go down and there's that little bridge and it's flatlands and if you're you know you come down barnum

[02:01:31] you're gonna turn if you make the right uh i forget the name of that road you pass a cemetery it's up but there's another trailhead what's that big hollow road big hollow thank you that's also an excellent trail system for mushrooms that big you know what i'm talking about the big hollow of course that's that leads to three different catskill high peaks and fantastic and what's great

[02:01:56] about that location too is plenty of parking you know so we could get a good you know we wanted to bring a number of people so big hollow is good barnum road is good but i'm open to other suggestions as well i mean i'd love to discover places i haven't been to yet so that would be great yeah well listen we can take you there so i i have just a couple other topics dosh you want to squeeze something in before i hit these yeah i i like what jonathan said about doing a future walk so that you go ahead

[02:02:24] tad do what you would you need to do yeah definitely and maybe maybe stosh we can our first community event and we can have jonathan come over and do a walk for all of the donors who pitched in to buy us that place at the end of moon hall road yes yeah right okay so so give us a half a million and then

[02:02:49] this time next year and prime foraging season hook up with jonathan and stosh and i and we can do a little foraging at the end of moon hall because by then you'll be broke if you gave us all the money to buy that place so you'll need free food yeah yeah so and you can we can dehydrate it on that stuff called newspaper before you go home all right so jonathan is there is there any like ethics

[02:03:16] foraging i'm out in the woods i see some great yeah uh merchandise that i want to go out and pluck or cut uh to bring home uh how much do i take how much do i leave intact look i say look look don't don't don't don't hug everything you know always leave a little something at least and really

[02:03:41] take what honestly you're either going to eat or dry or preserve don't waste it right because you get all excited and you say oh my god oh my god suddenly like chicken in the woods you don't need a whole you you see a whole bunch of it hum but when then i i did this recently i'm guilty of this i over harvested i over harvested and i realized i got home how am i going to cook all this this is insane so use that kind of judgment about what what you really can take and always leave something

[02:04:08] behind be cognizant of where you're walking you know if you're on the trail and you just pigs on the trail no big deal but if you're doing some bushwhacking please just be you know you don't please don't stomp on the young oak saplings that we so desperately need you know we need those so just be careful be cognizant of where you are and for your own safety for god's sake watch out for ground bees i mean jesus yeah careful out there yeah have you been either of you been hit by those

[02:04:35] guys yeah that kind of is a triggering reminder so i've been before i've been hit too uh i got hit on a mushroom walk i was leading and i put my basket down on the hole oh jesus oh man it was intense and wow he's crying he's crying jonathan's cried right now for the memories that was rough but you know the the blessing there was that there was a young person on the hike a young you know girl i think she was like

[02:05:03] 12 at the time and thank god it was me and it wasn't her you know because i made it out all right i didn't need any help or medical assistance you know it's okay well yeah it's nasty so just be careful just be careful so ethics you asked about ethics don't hog everything watch where you're stepping but also here you could feel good because remember this foraging for mushrooms is not the same as pulling a plant it's not a plant the true body of the fungus is the mycelium that white

[02:05:32] thready stuff you see when you roll a log that's the body the vegetative body the fungus is doing the eating growing living and dying the mushroom is merely the reproductive organ of the fungi it's like picking fruit like an apple or blueberries that's why it's ethical you could pick the mushroom because the body of the fungus is still in the soil or in the wood or what have you it's still there

[02:05:56] you've just taken yeah so am i but am i hard uh harming the reproductive potential of that area going forward by you know going in and taking 80 percent of the mushrooms there home with me because they're not around to to spread spores afterwards you know um i'm aware of one scientific study from italy that

[02:06:25] examined this question of whether uh that the foraging or collecting of mushrooms results in the decline of uh much of fungal reproduction and their conclusion was no it didn't you know it didn't i mean you're not gonna first of all you're not gonna take 80 of the mushrooms out because you can hardly see then the that 80 of the mushrooms are out there so we're talking about the mushrooms that are visible to you wherever you are and fortunately that's a smaller subset

[02:06:52] than the actual volume of mushrooms that are out there so there's that to give us comfort but the other source of comfort is that there's been no evidence to date that foraging leads to a decline in fungal populations and uh if anyone knows otherwise they can leave it in comments under your podcast and i'll certainly look at it and we can look at it but as far as the sciences goes no it's not

[02:07:16] damaging so speaking of sciences that kind of brings me to my last question the mycelial network what can you tell us about that well first of all so so uh don't think of mycelium as a network that conduct that connects mushrooms think of mycelium again that's that white thready stuff that you see

[02:07:38] as the body and you can think of fungi as inside out animals like animals they have to eat they can't produce their own food like as plants do they can't we we can't photosynthesize and mushrooms can and fungi cannot photosynthesize but unlike animals who take in our food we bite we eat we chew we digest

[02:08:02] etc fungi penetrate their food source release their enzymes out into the world around them then absorb the nutrients back inside themselves which is really crazy it's a weird lifestyle to think of right yeah definitely i mean it just so so by nature then if we think about mycelium then it's all about

[02:08:29] connectivity so if they're living in symbiosis with their plant hosts and we call those like the ecto ectomycorrhizal symbiosis ecto around the outside myco fungus rhizal roots so the chanterelles for example you see growing on the soil what you don't see is they're sending out little threads called hyphae that when bundled become mycelium they're sending those threads out to the roots of their host

[02:08:57] tree and around the rootlets they wrap the hyphae around there create a sheath and that sheath becomes a place of exchange where the fungus brings the tree water and nutrients and the tree brings the fungus sugars so it's mutually supportive i forgot why i'm even why am i talking about ectomycorrhizal symbiosis what was your original question it's a lot of words because yeah because i i tried to show

[02:09:22] that i was smart enough to talk about the network and i didn't have a fucking clue about anything think about how they live so they're there they live so much more intimately with their food sources than we do as i guess the point uh the in the in the simplest way so that's one lifestyle the other two lifestyles uh are uh parasitism where they just tackle uh living tissue at the disadvantage

[02:09:51] of the tree i mean they could like honey mushrooms are very popular very common and they're extremely virulent and will destroy a hardwood tree quickly but and then there are of course the decomposers which thank god for them break down woody tissue because and they're usually the pioneers because they have the enzymes capable of breaking down those complex polysaccharides those complex sugars like uh pectin

[02:10:16] lignin cellulose hemicellulose they could break those down they get the simple sugars to live on but the soil gets all those nutrients returned to it the nitrogen potassium phosphorus calcium and other nutrients go back into the soil to be uptaken by the plants again so these decomposers these harbingers of death out there breaking down the dead wood are doing us enormous favor because basically they're

[02:10:41] creating the foundation for the soil to come amazing wow i know they are incredible that's that's passion right there you know your yeah see the big ah yeah once again that's it's just phenomenal you know it's just that's why we have you you know on the show for your compassion and stuff like that you know just to see just to hear that like uh people can't see it which sucks i mean maybe a lot

[02:11:11] of people are asking about a video for this so um once again maybe maybe i'll do it but you know a lot of people it's a lot of work it's a lot of work people it's just stuff it is video production is a lot of work it is it is and just letting this go you know just like it's just it's tough so i'll i'll try i'll think about it i'll think about it but yeah we have yeah so we're gonna have a symbiotic

[02:11:34] relationship with jonathan because we want to learn from him we want to turn our listeners on to more knowledge from him right and i i know some pretty cool spots that we could take him kind of like uh what about stash what do you think about taking them out the trail to ashokin high point oh yeah yeah

[02:11:57] that's a lot of water it's a lot of stuff yeah plus it's got good exposure to stay moist longer yeah the canopy woods it's just yep it's kind of like north western facing so it's not going to get dried out on a is it a hemlock forest is it the largely hemlock oh if you want to go to hemlock forests then i would just yeah yeah we can take you into the black yeah we could go to the

[02:12:23] black forest the forest yeah i mean because i when my experience like if the darkest woods i know of are those hemlock groves i mean yeah it's like you can be in the middle of the day and it's just midnight yeah well those hemlock groves are dying in the catskills yeah yeah yeah bastards it's and says i mean i talked about this last week it was the uh the uh spotted lanternfly i saw them

[02:12:50] in the catskills yeah right it's just and i freaking tried to stomp on them as much as i can it sucks i saw them so uh once again we have jonathan tonight uh talking to us about mushrooms fungi uh all things about and uh you know we're looking forward to maybe having a a future walk with you jonathan coming back into the catskills and i i you know i'll guarantee a lot of people would be

[02:13:15] encouraged just even if it was just me and tad i like i'm pretty sure we might have to give you a trial run first jonathan just to make sure whatever it is let's whatever we can pull together let's try and pull together that's the next episode it'd be like tad died from consuming a mushroom oh my god where i did some really cool artwork yeah yeah tad would make it through peck road and yeah and then

[02:13:42] made some tie dyes they came out really groovy it did it did so you know once again jonathan thank you for joining us tonight uh hey it was an honor and a pleasure great meeting you ted yeah seeing you again has been wonderful and i hope this is just the first of uh many occasions where we can get together definitely absolutely let us know when you're in the catskills and uh you know i will definitely let you know that when i'm coming to the catskills next all right excellent so have a

[02:14:10] fantastic night and we will see you in the future hopefully sounds good god bless you all thank you keep in touch sir all right bye bye bye bye everyone i just want to thank you for listening to the show if you enjoyed the show subscribe and throw down a smooth review on spotify apple podcasts or any

[02:14:35] podcast platform that you use you can also check daily updates of the podcast hikes hiking news and local news on facebook instagram twitter and the official website of the show remember this you gotta just keep on living in the cat skills man l-i-v-i-n wicked wicked wicked wicked