How-To: Scout and Hunt Burn Morels

We’ve been having a great year hunting Western burn morels, and we’d love to share the secrets of our success as a thank-you gift to our paid subscribers. Without you, To The Bone won’t last, because, putting it bluntly, we can’t afford to write for free.

This advice is geared toward novices, but may also contain some tips for more experienced hunters. Here’s what we’ll go over:

• What to wear and take

• Hunting tips

  • What a morel looks like

  • Where to look for them

  • Map scouting

  • Ground truthing

  • Trees they like

  • How they present

  • Signs to look for

  • How to harvest

  • Safety

• After the hunt (mushroom care)

Holly and Hank picking a very nice flush of morels - around 75 - this week around the same log.

It’s possible you may have already missed burn morel season in your area. Morels typically like high temperatures in the 70s, and lows in the 40s. If that time has gone by for you, please bookmark this for next year. Or take a trip to cooler climates!

This advice is very West-centric because that’s where we hunt, and the West is where burn morels - the unusual abundance following a fire - are a Big Thing. But that doesn’t mean pieces of it won’t be useful if you’re hunting elsewhere.