A golden chanterelle is one of many edible mushrooms that can be found throughout Southeast Alaska and down into the Pacific Northwest. Kitty LaBounty will be in Wrangell Sept. 9-11 to talk about edible versus non-edible mushrooms.
Wondering if that cluster of mushrooms found on the roadside are safe to pick and eat? Odds are they're OK, and so are others.
To that end, the Friends of the Library is holding an event Sept. 9 to 11 at the Irene Ingle Public Library to inform foragers what mushrooms can be eaten again and again, and which ones should not be eaten even once.
Kitty LaBounty, a Sitka-based professor with the University of Alaska Southeast, is scheduled to share her knowledge on safe versus unsafe mushrooms when she comes to Wrangell in September. There will be a lecture, field trips to forage and a chance to review mushrooms that have been found.
"There are quite a few that are edible," LaBounty said in a phone interview. "When I teach classes, I tend to focus on 20 to 25. There's more than that, but I focus on things that are readily identifiable and not easily confused."
She said Southeast is not very well surveyed when it comes to how many species of mushrooms are found here, but she reckons it could be in the hundreds if not thousands. "I take a pretty conservative approach when I teach people to identify edibles."
LaBounty has become known in Southeast as the "Mushroom Lady" because of the classes she has taught since moving to Sitka from grad school in 1985. However, she said, she believes there are others who study the famed fungi just as much as she does, if not more.
Lori Bauer, vice president of the Friends of the Library, said she found LaBounty after her own curiosity about edible mushrooms led her to do a Google search about the topic. Bauer's interest stemmed from getting out and about last year.
"I'm interested in learning about the edible mushrooms," she said. "Last summer, I saw so many, but I didn't know which ones were edible."
Bauer joked, "Some you can only eat once."
LaBounty is hoping that not only will she be able to share her information, but that people in Wrangell who have been studying mushrooms for a while will have lots to share. She said much of the information will be repeated.
"There's lots of repetition," LaBounty said. "It makes people feel a little more confident."
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