Little Necks & Matsutake

We are into a new year. Two thousand and nine should prove to be a memorable year for Sarah and myself. We are getting psyched for our upcoming wedding and are excited to welcome friends and family from abroad to British Columbia.

Our last trip to Hornby Island, back in December, was a return to humankind's hunter-gatherer roots. We hooked up with friends and hit the shore at approximately midnight for low tide and the gathering of oysters and the digging of clams. We left a serpetine trail of excavations behind us as we probed for the clams, called little necks. Pictured are horse clams, dug the previous night at Miracle Beach, south of Campbell River.


The man looking sifty in the background is Mark Sloan, a fungi aficionado. We ventured out with him, his lovely wife Megan, and friends to Hornby's Mount Geoffrey, elevation 350 metres, to wander the forest hunting mushrooms, walk off our hangovers and view the view. We discovered patches of chanterelle and hedgehog mushrooms with Mark's guidance and identifying eye. As we returned back down the mountain along a wider, well-used trail, a clump of white at the edge caught our attention. We bent closer and breathed in the pungent odour of Tricholoma magnivelare, commonly known as the pine mushroom. The Japanese call the mushroom Masutake; it is a delicacy for which the Japanese pay premium prices. Early season Japanese Matsutake can be worth US$2000 a kilogram. The mushrooms we found were a combination of qualities, with decay occuring in the older specimens. The largest is pictured, an umbrella of a mushroom.

We left Campbell River over the Christmas-New Year period and spent our time in Vancouver. We rented snow shoes from Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC), a ubiquitously Canadian symbol, and journeyed north to Squamish and our friends Trish and Regan. We snow-shoed with them along a trail in Garibaldi Provincial Park - my first experience of snow shoes. Snow fell throughout the hike.


After the New Year celebrations we headed up to Cypress Provincial Park, situated on the North Shore of Greater Vancouver. We met friends and followed a trail to higher elevations, with views of Vancouver to the south, Vancouver Island to the west, Howe Sound to the northwest, and the Lions - a signature pair of peaks overlooking the city - to the north.

We ate lunch, a bento box of Shogatsu leftovers, watched closely by a pair of large, glossy black ravens, and pestered by a number of gray jays. The gray jay is colloquially known as meat bird, camp robber, venison-hawk, moose-bird and whiskeyjack (a corruption of an aboriginal name, Wisakedjak, for a mischievous trickster). The jays flitted amongst our group, living up to their reputation as they attempted to steal food from the hand or mouth. They were bold and incorrigible.


Vancouver from Cypress Provincial Park, looking southeast. The Lions Gate Bridge crosses from North Vancouver to Stanley Park and the downtown. Note the section of white snow in Stanley Park, a result of the extreme windstorms of last winter and the havoc they wrought amongst the park's trees.