Brain Fertilizer

Man, I wish I had a small forest of 40+ year-old evergreens!

The best part? They guard their plots like moonshiners or marijuana cultivators!

Pickers keep their patches secret and guard them from intruders, often with guns. A mushroom poacher once tried to shoot Kouy Loch, who both picks mushrooms and works as a “mushroom monitor” for the Forest Service. Dana Van Pelt, the owner of a campsite, said more than a thousand pickers come in good years, along with “the drugs, the prostitution, the robbing at gunpoint.”