MUSHROOMS!

An unidentified trio of big brown mushrooms- under a dry stand of dead lodgepoles. And below- A smaller cluster of slimy, bubbly mushrooms. The cluster was one of a handful of them that sprouted from a pile of very wet, very decayed hardwoods on the bank of a stream. I think they may have been some kind of velvet foot.
August and September, the fall months of the Southern Rocky mountains, are known for their great harvests of King and Aspen Boletes, oyster mushrooms and puffballs!

Below is one of several dozen giant "coral" fungi. I would give its common name, but my IDbook
gives only the family; CLAVARIACEAE

I accompanied our Chef, Jeff, on a hunt for these exciting edibles (and anything else we could find!) around Monarch Lake. The lake, just off the tip of Grandby Lake, is encompassed by a 4.5 mile loop trail and many others. We started out on the southern shore of the lake and began finding the 'shrooms near the STEAM DONKEY. This iron monster is some sort of a gygundus stream engine used in the early 20th century for pulling logs down the the reserviors and colorado river.
On the SE bend of the lake, we entered a huge wet spot where I discovered the first whole KING mushroom. Its stem was a wide as it's red/brown cap. Jeff found two others, though both were too small to pick just yet. We found 'shrooms that looked like moldy bagels, ones that looked like boiling velet and even some nice bug red/white spotted ones that reminded me of some delicious pastry. mmmm.....

We oo-ed and awe-d at all the colorful fungi for about an hour. My favorite was the big yellow coral thing.
This is one of those poisonous little "mower's mushrooms," sometimes eaten recreationally and referred to as a shroom... you know what Im takin about; they often contain some kind of hallucinogenic compound.

From here, Jeff took off on another trail, to finish off the long hike to crater lake, which lies on the treeline 8 miles from the carpark.

I continued along the sun-baked north shore, where I found a zillion cool rocks, a pair of grouse, a few shrooms and the truck. COOL! ! !

I found this MOLDY BAGEL sitting under a low spruce tree. The underside of it had gills and the bagel sat on a stem. I would have called it the moldy bagel mushroom, but it's already got a name: The Delicious Milky Cap.

Someone had obviously eaten the wrong shroom (or the right one?) when they named this guy!

Below-- A HAWKS WING mushroom is said to be edible, bt not so tasty. A meal of this'n may be bitter. On the bottom is a tiny yellow somethin' that I found growing in a mass of spongy moss. There were several of them, measuring only a cm or so in height, scattered on the big green blob. They call it an EARTH TONGUE

We also found a large round fly agaric, some huge pinkish coral things, a few button-like emeticas and about a dozen others that I am either unable to identify, or just too lazy to do so.