As many of you know, fall is my favorite season, and this fall has been a beautiful one. The weather has been perfect, with cool mornings and evenings yet beautiful warm days in between. Some days have even been too hot, though most of those were in October and not so much now in November. We have had fires on several of the colder evenings when the heat of the day wasn’t quite enough to ward off the chill inside once the sun went behind the trees and hill behind the house.

On the past couple of weekends I have taken advantage of the sunny, beautiful days to get out on my newest bike, a gravel bike I purchased specifically for riding on Greenwood Road. I have a road bike, sort of, it’s actually a time trial bike, but it has such skinny tires that I was afraid to ride it on Greenwood because of fear of flat tires. The gravel bike has fatter tires, more like on a mountain bike, plus extras like disc brakes and a larger gear ring to make climbing easier. Of course, as soon as I bought the new bike they decided to redo the chip seal on Greenwood! Riding on that new surface has been lovely, though there is still quite a bit of loose gravel in spots. I’ve taken the bike down to the end of Cameron Road and ridden up and back there where the elevation rise is more gentle, I’ve parked in the middle of the ridge and ridden to the end of Cameron and back to the car and I’ve ridden from my house out towards the coast. The stretch from my house west has a lot of hills so that I get about 1,500’ of elevation gain in just a few miles, while the western end has as much or more elevation gain but over more miles. I’m working on putting it all together, which, from my house to the coast and back, will be about 34 miles.

Yesterday, Sunday, I decided to take a break from riding my bike and take a long hike around the property instead. This time of year is when the mushrooms start to pop up. They seemed a little slow to start this year, probably because we didn’t have a lot of rain yet and also because of the heat on some of those days. On this walk, where my little dog, Chuck, and I meandered on and off the trails, we saw a lot of mushrooms; however, most of these mushrooms were knocked over. I wonder by what? Birds? Deer? I saw spots where birds had scratched in the leaves but they didn’t always correspond with the knocked over mushrooms.

As we walked around I remembered previous fall walks. As a child my father would take first me, then later me and my brother, out with him to search for mushrooms. He only picked one kind, “coccories,” which the rest of you may know as coccora or coccoli, Amanita calyptroderma. He called all other mushrooms “kill ‘em quicks” no matter what they were. Whether he knew if they were edible and just didn’t like to eat them or if he just didn’t know, he knew enough not to mess with any mushroom he wasn’t confident he could safely identify. I only learned much later in life that we were picking one of the most deadly species of mushrooms out there, though the variety we pick is edible. We quickly learned how to identify them and how to find them; they are best when very young and so we learned to look for small mounds of leaves which might hide young cocceries just pushing up from the earth.

A walk in the woods on a fall day