Last week I took a much needed vacation (kind of), as my parents were visiting for the first time since May of 2006. Now, I am certainly well aware of the bounty of 'free' food available around Seattle, and appreciate it greatly, but it was still astonishing to hear my parents practically shout out, 'Pull over, I see some blackberries!' multiple times each day. I assured them that wherever our destination was, there would be some to pick there - and there were, of course. They also raided the neighbors' trees and picked a large amount of two varieties of plum. From these items, we made dehydrated fruit rolls ('fruit roll-ups') and 30+ jars of delicious and low sugar jam (a bit tart, just the way I like it).


In addition, my parents being big into fishing, we went out for five straight days and fished for Oncorhynchus gorbuscha (pink salmon). I believe our total was 24 salmon altogether, though 12 were caught in the last day. I now have a whole lot of fresh and smoked salmon in my freezer. I also showed them how I scuba dive for Dungeness Crab (my dive buddy and I took home 10) in Puget Sound, and crawdads in Lake Washington.

I wanted to also show them the bounty of mushrooms we get in this area, but as luck would have it, it's been fairly dry. Even after we got a bit of rain and other people were finding Lobster and Chicken of the Woods mushrooms, I got skunked (despite someone telling me supposedly right where those Lobsters were, too...).

I did find this guy though - largest toad I've ever come across (Bufo boreas?). The thing easily took up my whole hand.


And then I found these freshly made marks:

I had to think a little about being alone on the trail (my parents were waiting at the trail head, haha), but alas, black bears are generally not a problem for humans (we are more to them, though).

Ok, I didn't get completely skunked - I found several of these nice-sized boletes, but I have no idea what species they are... so in all reality, unless I can get them ID'd and eat them, the mushroom hunt was unsuccessful.