MorelFest 2025

Searching for morels in the woods of Pennsylvania

“We need some rain”, I say as we pick our way through the parched woodlands at Wave Hill last Friday.

I said this offhandedly and didn’t fully understand the consequences of the statement until it came time to set up my tent later that night. After the Wave Hill event ended I drove straight from the Bronx down to Morelfest in Gettysburg, PA, (by way of the Walmart Supercenter in Mechanicsburg, PA).

The view from the road outside Morelfest. It was, for all intents and purposes, hosted in someone’s yard.

I pulled into MorelFest right around 8pm and there were maybe ten other tents set up. There had been some short patches of rain on the way down that I’d driven through, but nothing substantial.

As it goes, no sooner did I get out of the car than it begin to rain steadily. I urgently began to set up my tent and in the back of my head I kept in mind that it could potentially look really cool if I get it set up with rain fly on just as the rain really sets in. I will, however, admit I was fumbling. And to compound the fumbling one of the footings on a pole broke and I couldn’t fix it in the rain (yes, that’s what I’m going with).

By the time I got the pole situation sorted, the tent was soaked and not even worth erecting. A soggy tent looking lifeless on the ground as I continued to get wet. I was not stoked.

The vendor setup at MorelFest. People were slinging everything from plants to pizzas.

I’ll sleep in the car, no big deal. I push all the mushroom workshop boxes to one side. That includes placing the actual fruiting mushrooms on the roof in the rain so I don’t inhale spores all night, as one does. I managed to rig the tent up to dry in the car — stretched it out between the steering wheel, driver’s seat, and passenger seat with the ends shut in the door to keep the whole thing aloft — and I crammed into the back.

As the tent dried, the car windows got all steamy. To a passerby, it might have looked like there was some serious action going on inside. And action there was as I illegally streamed the second and third rounds of the NFL draft on my phone and ate chips with spicy Walmart guacamole for the next couple of hours.

It stopped raining around 11pm and by that point the tent had miraculously dried to the point where I was able to set it up and finally sleep comfortably in it.

I’m the dark green tent tucked in on the right. There wasn’t much room to get creative (as we were essentially in someone’s backyard) but I nestled my green little tent right next to the wood pile.

Saturday

I had signed up to volunteer (a nice way to get free admission to these festivals) and my first shift of the weekend was helping park cars from noon to 3pm on Saturday. I actually smiled when I got the assignment as this would not be my first rodeo on parking duty.

I’ve been tasked with the parking assignment at a few different functions and I kind of enjoy it. Not only do you get to be social and talk to folks, but more importantly you get to wield power over others. You tell them where to go and they obey. It can be intoxicating, and frankly dangerous in the wrong hands.

We actually got a little tight at one point but we were able to combine the day parking with the camping parking and that freed up plenty of space. The plight of the parking volunteer.

A very sturdy dog. An alapaha bulldog.

Throughout the shift I was able to hang with the welcome table volunteers (shoutout Jaderz and Kat) which made for a quick and easy shift. The only bummer was the parking shift conflicted with the Saturday foray so I wasn’t able to go out and look for mushrooms with the rest of the festival — kind of the whole point of the weekend.

To remedy that, after my shift ended I figured I’d go find some woods.

Michaux State Forest was a quick 15 minute drive west (that ran closer to a half hour after a quick pit stop at Mister Ed’s Elephant Museum and Candy Emporium). When in Orrtanna, Pennsylvania.

I found a quiet trailhead that ran along a creek, and while there weren’t any morels that afternoon, the unique find was this oyster-like mushroom (Phyllotopsis nidulans, perhaps) that had some sort of white mold growing all over it. A fungus on a fungus.

Of note that afternoon in Michaux. Some yellow/orange pleurotoid mushroom (the only gilled mushroom I saw) with a mold growing on it.

One of the main events of the weekend was a fancy, foraged dinner which you could buy tickets to Saturday evening (I did not). Following the dinner was music which really tied the whole festival together.

The Dirt Turtles played a rocking two sets that had the energy to carry late into the night if it weren’t for the 10PM hard stop on amplified noise. Have to be courteous to the neighbors. Sam Warren, a mushroomer from Western New York and founder of Food Forest Fungi, is also the elecric guitarist in this Americana, bluegrass, blues, and all around rocking band.

I went to bed after the music but some folks stayed up to hang around the couple campfires that burned on into the night.

Tbe music was on the same stage the presenter’s used inside the barn.

Sunday

I had parking from 9am to 12 that morning. Right around the onset of the shift, Samantha (the cohost/organizer and defacto volunteer coordinator) basically told me I didn’t need to worry about my shift that day. Most of the day passes were sold for Saturday so there wouldn’t be too many comings and goings that morning. At least not enough to warrant a volunteer dedicated to the parking.

I used the open morning to hit the therapeutic movement class led by Lisa Loiseau, packed up my tent, and then geared up for the foray.

A pawpaw (Asimosa triloba) flower.

The foray departed the campground around 12:30 and we headed northeast toward State Game Lands 242 (romantic, I know). Even more charming were the echos of gunshots from the range right next to the property… we were definitely keen to not stray too far to the left when looking for mushrooms.

The foray leader, Justin, gave the group some important morel advice before he turned us out on the woods. He suggested that we look around the base of shagbark hickories (Carya ovata) for morels, as the mushrooms were known to associate with this tree species in the area. The common trees we hear in the northeast are tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera), American elms (Ulmus americana), and ash (Fraxinus). Apple orchards work too, but I’d never heard of shagbark hickories with morels.

Justin hypothesized that the bark, as it distinctly peels off in long vertical strips and falls to the forest floor, adds nutrients to the soil the fungi can digest/absorb. Wielding this advice I started plucking around the shagbarks and it wasn’t too long before I went to step over a jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) and right under my foot was tiny little honeycombed mushroom.

Tulip morel (Morchella diminutiva). Morels are cool to the touch, much cooler than the air temperature.

First morel of the season, quite exciting. I crouched down, got a few pictures, and then looked around to see if there were any others. The closest woody plant was a bush honeysuckle (Lonicera mackii) but there was a shagbark hickory about ten feet past the shrub. After I got closer to the shagbark, I crouched down again and this time a few more morels started to pop into focus. After slowly navigating the full circumference of the tree at about a fifteen foot radius, I’d found at least ten different morels. None were taller than my palm. Interestingly, though, I found multiple species of morels.

I found two different species of morel around the same tree. Morchella diminutiva on the left and Morchella punctipes on the right.

I poked around the woods for another couple hours, concentrated around tulip poplars and shagbarks, but didn’t find any other morels. Different folks from the group found a few more scattered around the forest, and some folks found morels for the first time in their lives. By all measures it was a successful foray on a beautiful day. Some people headed back to the festival grounds for the last presentations, but I was already a half-hour closer to where I was sleeping that night so my festival ended on this morel high.

A handful of morels from the afternoon. I dried them out on the car dashboard on the drive home and they deposited white spores on the dash.

All in all it was a fun, tight-knit festival. The speakers and workshops were engaging and the Dirt Turtles really capped off the festival with a rockin performance. The woods of Pennsylvania are beautiful, too, I certainly did not get enough time in them. Tons of thanks to Unkle Fungus and Samantha for hosting a wonderful mushroom festival, I’m eager to get back down there again.

This is the first time I’ve sent a MM email out on a Thursday. Fun little historical moment we all get to share. Truffle Thursday? Maybe not. I’ll be back with an MM or TT next week and we’ll look a little more closely at the half-free morel (Morchella punctipes) that was featured above.

Until then, let’s responsibly wish for some rain. Happy Beltane everyone,

Aubrey