Mushroom Foraging in Early June
- Orion Aon
- Jun 10
- 4 min read
In the past, June has often felt like one of the slower warm months for mushroom hunting in Colorado. It's after the best of the low-elevation mushrooms are done, but before a lot of the summer species begin to appear. However, recently June has become a month I look forward to mushrooming in Colorado. New species and a changing climate make for some excitement during this otherwise transitional month.
The first weekend of June, 2025, I had two private classes scheduled. I spent the mornings teaching plants and mushrooms, and the afternoons chasing mushrooms of my own and taking photos for my book. This is a little trip report to serve as an example of how fun Colorado mushroom hunting can be in June!
On Saturday, I went up high to check for snow melt mushrooms. Melting snow fields isn't typically the place where you would think of mushroom hunting, but there are some very cool species that fruit with the cold water as it melts and runs down the mountains. The first on my list is the snowbank lorchel, Maublancomyces montanus. I found and ate these for the first time a couple of years ago, and now I make at least one trip a year into the high country during spring to search for them.
These mushrooms are related to morels and taste quite similar, but they occasionally receive a bad reputation because some related "false morels" contain gyromitrin, namely, mushrooms in the Gyromitra esculenta group. However, this species has been shown to contain none of that mycotoxin.
The full article PDF is available on the author's website.
In the first location I stopped to check, I found three of the lorchels I was after! Later that day, I came across another large flush of them at a lower elevation, but they had all dried up and gone bad. If you ever see those, it's your sign to move higher!
During my class on Saturday, we found another morel relative that I had been wanting to find for several years. The wrinkled thimble-cap or early morel, Verpa bohemica. These are also a tasty edible mushroom that has been subject to some misinformation online due to the "false morel" allegations. I cooked some up and they were delicious! Very similar to morels, with a slightly more meaty texture. These mushrooms were growing in an area guarded by the worst swarms of mosquitoes I have ever seen in Colorado. Find the mozzies to find the mushrooms, but bring some bug repellent!
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On Sunday, after my class, I made it my mission to hike into one of my reliable early porcini spots. Previously, the earliest I'd found porcini was June 25th, but I saw a few reports of people finding king boletes abnormally early this year, so I figured I'd better go check. On the drive there, I spotted a big fairy ring of Agaricus mushrooms in a meadow, so I hurriedly parked and ran over to harvest some. I believe these are salt-loving agaricus, Agaricus bernardi. They smelled pleasant, like mild mushrooms with a hint of brine, and stained a rufescent (a fancy word for slightly red) hue.
Then, on the hike into my porcini spot, I also found two huge flushes of fairy ring mushrooms, Marasmius oreades. These are more of an intermediate species because of the deadly toxic look-alikes that are also little brown mushrooms (LBMs), but once you learn them, they are well worth foraging. They have a pleasant, nutty flavor and hold up well to high heat and longer cooking times. These are pretty common in any grassy habitats, especially in urban areas.
Finally, after a little over a mile of hiking through wet trails and climbing through lots of deadfall, I reached my porcini spot. This special place is situated at around 8,000 feet, on a small, flat area tucked into the bend of a meandering mountain stream. In the center of the flat is a beautiful, mature blue spruce, which serves as the mother tree for the king boletes that I find here. I felt like I had to approach quietly for some reason. As if I couldn't believe that I might see some porcini mushrooms two weeks early and if I was too loud they'd suck back into the earth. I circled the mother tree, carefully searching the grass, and sure enough, a perfect porcini button was waiting about 10 feet from the base of the trunk! I noticed another smaller button just emerging from the soil a few feet away, and then a large flush of buttons bubbling out of the soil a little ways off in the thicker grass. All in all, I ended up with about fifteen lovely buttons!
So, if you ever find yourself focused on morels because there are no other mushrooms to find in June, try switching things up. Head up to the high country to look for the morel relatives, or check some low-elevation spruces. You never know what you might find!