Steph and I wanted to find some mushrooms due to the unseasonably early rains.  We first went to Point Reyes almost exactly two weeks after the rains.  We had done a moderately successful mushroom search at the Bear Valley Visitor Center a few years ago and wanted to see if the areas that had mushrooms last time had some this time.  We didn’t find all thet many, with the only edible ones we found being a few deer mushrooms.  We also found a strange yellow polypore that turned out to be a dyeing mushroom.  We met Uzer and two of his friends there, but they had a dog and child, so were unable to actually both join for the hike.  The wife joined, and we had about 45 minutes of searching before heading back.  Steph and I continued our search in some of the other areas of the park, but were similarly disappointed.  It was clearly a little too early for the mushrooms there.

The next weekend we had plans to go to the renaissance fair and decided to stop by Soquel forest beforehand.  The hike was really nice, and we saw a bunch of oyster mushrooms on the fallen trees.  I think there were a few spots that formerly had nice mushrooms growing, but they had been harvested, likely the previous day.  It is absolutely worth going again before we leave.  The forest also has a tree map, which is rare.  It has the general tree composition of the different parts of the forest with approximate age and size details of the trees.  It lets us know where the most likely place for the mushrooms we are looking for to be.  That combined with the topographic map give us an idea of where we should be looking.