Guys, I love mushrooms. I love the taste of mushrooms, I love the variety in shapes of mushrooms, I love finding little mushrooms growing on downed trees and in moist nooks and crannies, and I recently discovered that I love the explosion of color mushrooms can provide. Great Smoky Mountains National Park had an absolute abundance of mushrooms, and I couldn't stop marveling at each and every one that I came across. I knew about your standard brownish-tanish-whitish mushrooms, the ones that grew back home in Nebraska and the ones you find at the grocery store, but I had no idea that mushrooms came in so many different colors. In the park, I found blood red mushrooms on the side of a moss covered log, tiny pale yellow mushrooms hidden in a secluded notch in some rocks, giant ones clinging to the side of living trees that were dark brown on top with startlingly bright white marshmallow-like growths underneath, and I even stumbled across deep green mushrooms that blended in with their surroundings so well that I wouldn't have noticed them if I hadn't tripped and nearly squash them with my hand as I caught myself. I found these toxic-orange mushrooms on the side of a back country gravel road through a small corner of the park, just off of the Blue Ridge Parkway. They were so striking that I actually thought someone had put a deflated traffic cone in the road, until I got closer and realized they were giant mushrooms. The near-daily rain and temperate climate in the mountains provide a perfect home for such a variety in fungi, and I wouldn't be surprised to find some other random color of mushroom (purple? blue? pink? oh, please let there be pink!) growing on a tree root somewhere.
Leave me a comment below and tell me what you think about mushrooms. Are you a fan? Do you like the taste of the edible ones?
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