Magic Mushrooms Fire Up Mad Scramble : Idaho: Big morel crop is expected because of Pacific Northwest blaze last year. Expensive fungi thrive on wood ash and soil disturbance. Authorities brace for confrontations between rival pickers.

Once the snow melts on the burned-over expanses from Idaho’s colossal 1994 fires, morel mushrooms will start popping out of the blackened ground.

That’s a fact of nature. It also will be a cue for increased activity by Forest Service and local law enforcement officers.

They’re preparing for a phenomenon that has some of the trappings of the 19th-Century gold rush camps: violent confrontations between commercial pickers over the pricey fungus that are worth close to their weight in gold.

“People get pretty possessive,” said Russ Newcomb, special agent for the Boise National Forest. “They get out in a field of mushrooms and somebody comes along. They get touchy.”

The golden mushrooms, which resemble a sea sponge on a stalk, are often found the year after a fire because they thrive on wood ash and a disturbance of the soil such as a bulldozer track, according to Marcia Wicklow-Howard, a Boise State University mycologist.

The burned, black soil from a forest fire also attracts the sun’s warmth, causing the spores to grow underground the same year as the blaze. The following spring, they erupt with the snowmelt.

Fires blazed through the parched evergreens last year. On the 2.3-million-acre Payette forest, about 70 miles north of Boise, 230,000 acres were charred in 1994. Fires also affected 211,000 acres of the 2.5-million-acre Boise National Forest, immediately northeast of the city.

Dried morels are in high demand by upscale restaurants and consumers worldwide and can earn gatherers $1,200 a day or more.

Pickers searching for a windfall will be watching the Idaho forests. If previous harvests in eastern Oregon are any indication, local authorities could be hard pressed to police them.

Many of the pickers are from Cambodia or Vietnam and speak little English, so miscommunication is common. In LaGrande, Ore., last year, competitors killed an Asian picker.

“A lot of times we end up with fights, illegal weapons discharges. The sheriff has to respond,” Newcomb said. “There could be abandoned cars, sanitation problems or fish and game violations.”

Payette forest officials said most of the pickers come from West Coast cities such as Seattle.

Valley County Sheriff Lewis Pratt said the pickers arrive in buses or trucks set up for drying and “all the indigents and poor folks who need the work set up their tents to go picking.”

Pratt fears that the mushroom explosion will be a bigger financial burden than the policing his department had to do during the more than two months the forests around McCall burned last year.

Newcomb said the federal government would help foot the bill.

Commercial and hobbyist pickers will pay a daily $5 fee to hunt for morels anywhere on the huge expanses charred by the largest fires. There is no fee for picking in the untouched green areas or on tiny burned spots often ignited by lightning strikes.

Commercial buyers must obtain a $500 permit if they use federal land for their vehicles and drying equipment.

Wicklow-Howard said it is unfortunate that the Idaho tradition of heading into the forests in the spring for mushrooms will now come head to head with heated commercial competition.

But the dry conditions that caused Idaho’s forest caldron last year could make any morel crisis brief. The Idaho mushrooms would have a shorter life span than those on burn areas in humid Washington or Oregon. By the second year, the morel phenomenon should abate.

That isn’t soon enough for Pratt, who envisions long hours policing the fields of fungi.

“Even though the fires are over,” he said, “we’re still recovering from them.”