This local mushroom once drew the world’s eye. Now, it grows quietly.

Raindrops slid off Kristen and Trent Blizzard’s jackets as they walked across wet sand in the Oregon dunes on a drizzly Sunday morning — decent weather for peak mushroom foraging season. 

Between the temperate Siuslaw National Forest and the Pacific Ocean at Lane County’s edge, they searched for a rare local fungus found with a deep global footprint: the matsutake.

It thrives here because it needs gritty, well-drained soil. The matsutake’s fungal network also relies on tree roots, these growing beneath conifers.

Kristen Blizzard knelt into a pile of needles and brushed them aside to reveal a pale, cream-colored cap pushing up from the earth. Snapping it with sand clinging to the base, she lifted it to inspect the thin, tissue-like veil, then peeled it back to reveal the gills. 

“What I go by is that if the gills are still white, then they’re still good to eat,” she said, bringing the mushroom to her nose for a hint of pine and cinnamon.

Then she placed it in her bag, as so many have done here before.

The Blizzards are driven by the allure of the pursuit and the reward of this mushroom’s rich umami flavor. But other foragers have a commercial interest here, in what was the center of a once-booming matsutake market.

Nearly 90% of matsutake mushrooms picked commercially in the United States are exported, primarily to Japan, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The meaty, aromatic matsustake, Japanese for pine mushrooms, is a traditional autumn food there.

By the mid-1990s, prices had climbed as high as $600 a pound, prompting the Forest Service to regulate harvesting through a permit system that is still in place today — even as demand shifts with changing tastes and new tariffs on U.S. exports.

“They work really hard, those commercial hunters,” Trent Blizzard said, and Kristen added, “It’s a tough way to make a living.”  

Mushroom wars

Foraging means training the eye to spot the small bumps, spending long nights in the cold, bending again and again. For many cultures, the effort has been worth it since before written history.

The Karuk Tribe, who called it xayviish, harvested it along the Klamath River. Later, Japanese immigrants brought their beloved fall foraging tradition with them to Oregon.

The mushroom never fully entered mainstream American cuisine — except for those who sought to profit from it.

By the late 1970s, demand surged in Japan, where matsutake habitat had been depleted by development. At the same time, forests across the Pacific Northwest were experiencing their own ecologic loss from heavy logging.

Oregon’s pace of logging began to slow during the “timber wars,” as tensions escalated between timber companies and environmental activists fighting to protect old-growth forests for wildlife, especially the northern spotted owl.

As matsutake foraging surged, the U.S. Forest Service grew concerned over another natural resources conflict. It was another private enterprise unfolding on public land, particularly near Crescent Lake and Chemult, where centuries of volcanic activity left pumice-packed soil ideal for matsutake.

At its peak, the boom attracted more than 1,500 pickers — many nomadic, following the season south from British Columbia to California. Migrants from Southeast Asian countries, such as Cambodia, joined the trade, some of whom continue picking today.

“It was remarkable,” said Mitchell Lachapelle, who manages permits for the Central Coast Ranger District. “Everybody just went hog-wild on it. That can be very detrimental to the population.”

Over the years, the value of matsutake fell from its triple-digit heights.

American exports have declined as China increased its supply, and some importers say younger generations have shown less interest amid shifting global food tastes. 

The market now faces another strain as uncertainty over Trump-era tariffs between the United States and Japan threatens to raise export costs for food and agricultural goods, further unsettling conditions for commercial harvesters and producers. 

But matsutake has yet to be cultivated, and the trade remains entirely wild. So, regulation continues in Oregon.

In Lachapelle’s district, 100 commercial-use permits are issued each season at $250 each, first come, first served. The goal, he said, is to protect the resource and ensure it remains for future generations.

Whether matsutake can truly be overharvested, however, remains a contested question among mycologists and foragers alike.

Prime fungal grounds 

Matsutake are a bit like apples — the fruiting stage of a larger system. But instead of growing on trees, they rise from an underground web of fungal threads called mycelium. The network anchors the mushrooms and spreads through and between trees.

The fungi draw sugar from tree roots. In return, they deliver water and soil nutrients, which the trees use to produce more sugar. That mutually beneficial exchange allows matsutake to grow, mature and release spores, carrying the cycle forward.

New matsutake networks are rarely established from spores alone. Reproduction depends largely on the living networks already in place, said Thomas R. Horton, a recently retired professor emeritus at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

“With matsutake and truffles, people will go out there with rakes and rake the forest floor,” said Horton, explaining a tactic where people try to harvest in bulk. “That’s where all the mycelium is doing its thing, the networks, and that is not good, like really not good.”

Horton has studied fungi for much of his career. He began researching matsutake in the Oregon dunes near Florence in 1994 after the rush drew national attention to both sides of the Cascades.

He studied how pine trees take root in sandy places and collected fungi to analyze their genetic material. That meant grinding mushroom gills with a mortar and pestle, adding chemicals, mixing the solution and spinning it in a machine to separate the DNA from everything else.

The work continues today among both academic and community scientists. Mycology remains an understudied field with limited data and many unanswered questions about fungi and their broader role in ecosystems — a role that could be altered by climate change. 

“Matsutake like the cool nights, and it’s just been really warm lately,” Trent Blizzard said, sharing his observations during a late November hunt in the dunes.

As president of the North American Mycological Association, Blizzard had hosted a conference just weeks earlier in Florence. He coordinated workshops for nearly two dozen scientists and foragers. They searched for every mushroom species they could find in the area, collecting samples for an herbarium and ongoing DNA sequencing.

Now the time for matsutake, which usually pops between October and December, ends until next year. But as one mushroom’s season ends, another’s begins — winter chanterelles, along with species that aren’t edible but, as Kristen Blizzard put it, are “beautiful and fun to find.”