FUNGUS RISING.(spongy black morel mushrooms arose from area devastated last summer by the Moose Fire in northwestern Montana)(Brief Article)

Though the seventy-one-thousand-acre Moose Fire that visited northwestern Montana last summer may have destroyed millions of board feet of timber, redirected hundreds of family vacations, and displaced a handful of households, it proved to be a thoughtful guest after all. Plenty of snow fell on the mountainsides over the winter, and the blackened trees looked like week-old stubble. In the spring, the snowmelt turned the forest floor into deep ashen muck. Then a few warm days came along, and--voila!--pay dirt. Multitudes of spongy black morel mushrooms rose from the earth. Area residents, victims last summer of drought and fire, are now beneficiaries of a bumper crop of one of the most precious kinds of fungus in the world of haute cuisine. "I had five different guys in one day come in here trying to sell me morels," said Steve Jordan, the co-owner of the Dinosaur Cafe, in Missoula, more than a hundred miles south of the fire. Jordan has been selling a morel veloute for four bucks a bowl, and morels at the Missoula Farmers' Market are as common as green beans and almost as cheap.

Morels, any of various edible mushrooms of the genus Morchella, range across much of North America, but, because they are notoriously finicky about soil conditions and other variables, people who consistently find them are considered shamanistic by those who don't. Morels appear beneath dead elm trees in Illinois, under decaying tulip poplars in Virginia, and among certain aspen stands in Washington. To find a good morel spot takes luck and hours of wandering through forests. If you know about one, you keep it secret. But a forest fire in the right habitat can change that.

Cathy Cripps, a mycologist at Montana State University, said,"We think that the intense heat helps germinate latent mushroom spores or sclerotia on the forest floor, or that the radical change in soil chemistry encourages the existing mycelium"--the mushroom's underground root system--"to suddenly proliferate, or that both these things happen. Good forest fires make it so you can find morels just by watching the national news."

In other words, this summer just about anyone can go to the Moose Fire (as both the fire and the area it burned are known) and load ...