The weather – day after day of sparkling, blue skies and spring flowers – was undeniably spectacular. For a string of sun-soaked days, each evening found children splashing playfully in the river and brown trout rising explosively to flies. Everywhere I looked I saw people smiling, their relief palpable on the heels of another long and trying winter.

Eliana didn’t miss a beat as I walked in the door, kicked off my boots, and slipped a small brown paper bag into the fridge. “Are those mushrooms? Did you find those in the woods?” She was onto me, leaving her post of helping mama stir shiitake and tofu to investigate.

No matter how many morels one has found, the first find of the season is always a revelation. I’m making a pilgrimage to an old favorite ramp patch, following a trickling streambed up a craggy hillside of hickory, yellow birch, ash and beech. It still feels early for morels in northern Vermont’s hills and I’ve learned to pace myself, saving the epic hunts for peak conditions. But with the sweet smell of springtime in the air and the temperature pushing 80, I can’t help but slow down beneath a hefty ash tree that somehow feels just right for Morchella.

The season’s first morels, even if growing in highly questionable soil in downtown Burlington, always are a true sight to behold. Jenna, right out the passenger seat window as we were parking, spotted two plump yellow morels on woodchips among dog-doo and debris.

It was 11am, and our morel count for the day had already topped 300. We were not hunting the mighty burns out West, nor were we in the Midwest’s exceptionally fertile morel grounds. My guide, a gracious and seasoned hunter with a keen instinct towards ecological patterns, had led me to a mystery Vermont morel motherlode.

It is the ultimate forager’s dilemma. After miles of hunting, you spot your first morel of the season, a pristine yellow. You yelp gleefully, smile uncontrollably, reach down to feel its cool flesh in your palm.  You reach for your pocketknife as you prepare to harvest it from the sandy spring soil.

With only a sliver of sunlight left in the sky, I head for the hills in search of spring’s most coveted wild delicacy. Soon I find myself on hand and knee, scouring the soil beneath a giant ash as my setter howls madly into the twilight. I see a morel menagerie - plump and pickable blacks, yellows, and half-frees - in my mind’s eye, but my fingers find only leaf litter and hollowed acorns on the forest floor. I am hunting with my hands as much as my eyes, as the day grows dim and a silver crescent rises in the mid-May sky.

This proud forager has a confession to make – the closest I’ve come to a morel this spring was inadvertently stepping on a lone Gyromitra esculenta. It was a gruesome site, too – the convoluted, wrinkly flesh squished like a false morel pancake on the ground.

We always enjoy receiving notes from blog readers, workshop participants and fellow mushroom enthusiasts. When local Vermont photographer Monica Donovan contacted us earlier this year asking if she could accompany us on a foray for a personal wildcrafting photography project, we gladly welcomed her along.

Even up in Vermont we have arrived at the tail end of morel season. I am still spotting plenty of morels, but they are bloated and waterlogged, the neglected victims of slugs, snails, heat, and torrential rain.

The alarm was set for 8am, but we awoke at 5:45 to the gentle pitter-patter of rain. I rolled over and tried to fall back asleep, but Jenna was already riled up and rearing to go. The morels were summoning us. We listened.

The news came in last night, just as the sun was sinking into Lake Champlain. "Hey, hey, hey! Found my first blacks today!!!" Local forager Moore Mushrooms was starting off the season right, somehow managing to find the proverbial needle in the parched and sprawling haystack. We added morels to the ForageCast on Monday, but with the caveat that only a good rainstorm would send these finicky fruiters up from the earth. Moore must have been out at his secret spots with a watering can, lovingly coaxing those blacks out of the ground. His harvest was modest, but enough to send me into a frenzy.

Morels are deliciously close, and the first ForageCast of 2013 is here. Despite the dry ground, blacks are beginning to push their way out of the forest floor throughout New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Even up north we are nearing prime time.

As one of the season’s biggest winter storms prepares to slam Vermont, southern mushroom hunters are happily harvesting morels. MorelHunters.com is reporting finds throughout Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Kentucky. Hunters as far west as Oklahoma are also frying up morels as I sit by the woodstove awaiting another dumping of snow.

I am here to tell you that morels really do exist. This may not sound like a mycological epiphany, and I am well aware that many of you flatlanders have been finding (and promptly devouring) morels for weeks now. Of course, I too have found plenty of morels in past seasons, and there was a time last spring when morels felt like a tangible, edible reality. But after an epic search that began prematurely with a hiccup of balmy weather in March, I was starting to wonder if the universe was playing a big trick on me. Do morels really exist, I began to question, or are they the pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow, always just out of reach?

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time staring at the forest floor recently. My futile and often maddening pursuit of morels continues, as I find myself gazing relentlessly at the parched ground and praying for a spring miracle.