Plump hedgehog mushrooms are fruiting at the forest’s edge, but there’s no time to stop for these gourmet edibles – Eliana has already scurried up the rocky path far ahead of us. “Pa! Waxy caps!”

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.

Gary Lincoff, legendary mushroom expert, naturalist, writer, teacher, and radiant spirit, passed away on Friday morning. He will be deeply missed. I never had the chance to meet Gary, but his work left a lasting impression on me and instilled an enduring sense of wonder for the mycological world. When I was all of ten, his Audubon guide caught my eye in a bookstore display, and I begged my mom to buy it for me. She reluctantly obliged, and that became the bible that I took on countless hunts and used to identify my first hen of the woods as a child.

It’s nearly dusk and I am bushwhacking up a steep hillside of mixed conifers, punctuated by ancient oaks. The oaks that stabilize these craggy slopes are survivors - spared widespread logging not due to conservation but to convenience, the prohibitive price of hauling hardwood out a ravine.

With wild strawberry and spearmint on my tongue, and chanterelles on my mind, I walk past the sun-splashed frog pond and into a dark glade of spruce. I’m back in familiar territory, having recently returned to northern Vermont after a stint in the southern Green Mountains.

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.

Wintergreen berries (Gaultheria procumbens) are my favorite January breath mint and trailside snack. One of the few fruits that is actually at its sweetest and freshest on a cold winter or early spring day, frozen wintergreen berries offer the texture of sorbet and a classic wintergreen flavor.

Camouflaged among the freshly fallen maple leaves, autumn mushrooms are thriving in the wet woods. The long-awaited rains - slow, steady, and abundant - arrived just before a looming frost that threatens to put the mushrooms to bed for the season.

My heart sank as I reached the crest of the hill to find my most faithful maitake (hen of the woods) tree standing naked, unadorned. After a summer plagued by drought, I had grown accustomed to such disappointment. But the successful hunter is an eternal optimist, always seeing potential in every fiber of the forest. We’d finally gotten a half-inch of rain, and it couldn’t hurt to get down on my hands and knees and scour for signs of hen.

My daughter, at two-years-old, already understands where her favorite food comes from. “Papa, hunt mauk-mee,” (mushrooms) she says. “Hike.”

How can I resist? I take her in one arm, paper bag and mushroom knife in the other, and we hit the trails behind our house just before sunset.

As I entered the woods with my childhood best friend on my 30th birthday backpacking adventure, my attention was fixed on the ground as we followed a languorous river. Lipstick­-red, vomit­-inducing emetic Russulas lined the trailside, and acrid peppery milkies were sprayed about the flat forest floor. Deadly destroying angels were everywhere, menacingly elegant and dangerous. Yet a three-­mile, flat riverside walk into the backcountry did not reveal a single gourmet mushroom, and the soil seemed drier with each step.

Like a crimson tongue shooting up from the scorched earth, scouring for moisture, the beefsteak polypore commanded my attention. Also called the ox tongue, the beefsteak (Fistulina hepatica) is a beguilingly beautiful polypore that I almost never find, let alone on a bone-dry August afternoon

The forest is flush with veins of gold that cut through dark hemlock stands and weave their way around towering spruce. A week of powerful afternoon thunderstorms broke the early July dry spell, receding to reveal a bumper crop of chanterelles flanked by porcini. Watch your step, because lobsters are lurking underfoot, and baby black trumpets are sprouting between the beech trees. The slugs have already arrived at the great woodland feast, and I invite you to join them!

It rains as I write, a good slow and steady soak that is sure to summon great flushes of gourmet and medicinal fungi. After a dry start to the summer season, golden chanterelles and boletes – from painted to porcini – are poking their familiar faces up from the warm July soil.

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.