Somewhere in the thick forest above Red Feather Lakes, mushroom foragers Tom McKinnon and Jay Berger were puzzling over a backcountry map, debating the most approachable route to the Pearl Fire burn scar. The130 acres of scorched mountaintop that burned last September in a remote part of Northern Larimer County may hold a treasure trove of mushrooms.
There are no hiking trails here. McKinnon and Gerber traced out a rough route towards the northeastern perimeter of the scar. They pushed ahead through the gnarly terrain, but a few scratches hardly register when you’ve caught the fever for burn morels, a very special kind of wild mushroom. “I don’t think we’d come walking up these rocky hillsides and over all these downed trees just looking for any other mushroom,” Berger said. “You really have to work hard to find burn morels.”
Mushrooms are having a moment in Colorado. Mycological societies are suddenly hot. Foraging is more popular than ever. Earlier this year, the state even adopted its first official mushroom. Amid that hype, the burn morel stands apart. It’s prized for its tastiness. It’s enigmatic and particular about its environment. And according to experienced forager Kristen Blizzard, the burn morel loves a good wildfire. “(Burn) morels pop in crazy numbers after wildfires in the West, if the right kind of forest has burned,” Blizzard said. “And if you have consistent average precipitation and good snow pack.”
Blizzard is co-founder of Modern Forager, an online clearinghouse for all things burn morel – including detailed maps of promising burn scars in conifer forests from Colorado all the way to Alaska. The most promising areas are where the forest has only partially burned. “You would want to look for areas with brown needles on the ground and needles left in the trees,” she said. “Lots of structure left in the forest, because the morels are going to appreciate those shady areas that are retaining moisture.”
Burn morels are but a small subset of the Morchella genus of fungi, beloved as a culinary delicacy. Most species of Morchella mushrooms grow in reliable, if dainty numbers, in the same area year after year – coveted hot spots that foragers hoard as secrets. “In the East and in the Midwest, they are revered as sort of like a generational pastime,” Blizzard said. “It’s something that grandparents have been passing down through the generations for years.”
Burn morels on the other hand, are wonderfully prolific. Blizzard described flushes that produce thousands of mushrooms at a time. But they’re also very fleeting – they only fruit in the immediate wake of a wildfire. “They show up the spring after the fire, in years one through three,” Blizzard said. “This year, in 2025, we are hunting 2024 wildfire scars.”
