PM Explore Lake Padden 10/1/20

A squinting autumn sun poured through cracks in the grey clouds above Lake Padden, dappling the dusty emerald canopy with specks of copper and gold. Under the canopy, signs of fall pushed through the remnants of summer. The air felt fresh.

The boys gathered for opening circle under the sparse canopy. Our goal for the day was navigation. From our starting area, and onwards towards “base camp”, where we would have lunch and explore a little further through a couple games and discussion. Slowly but surely, we picked our way through the forest, exploring evidence of the impending seasonal shift. Here and there were scattered pale, brittle maple leaves, settling over ragged sword ferns, while desiccated moss drank in the morning humidity with gusto. The boys began noticing the copious abundance of mushrooms in this autumn forest landscape: every glance into the woods revealed a new splotch of fungi on the ground or on dead wood. Fungus plays a key role in this forest ecosystem.

Over lunch we thought about digestion and decomposition. We do it to food - meat, vegetables, grains; while fungi does it with forest materials. Without fungi, nothing in the forest would ever decompose. The boys thought about thousands of years of leaf litter and fallen trees… we’d have to excavate for months to find the forest floor! With fungal assistance, however, all of that dead material is recycled into new biological building blocks.

Although fungi decompose a wide variety of natural materials, it shares a special relationship with trees. All tree decomposition relies on fungi (from leaves and needles to cones and bark), while many grasses and some plants rely on bacteria. Tree roots intertwine with an expansive mycorrhizal (fungal root) network, and share water and nutrients to build the foundation of the forest ecosystem. Fall is a season of fruiting for the mushroom kingdom - anything visible is just the fruiting body of the much larger and more complex fungal organism. They put on a show during this season - and the boys were fascinated by the display. From the deep burgundy shrimp russulas to bright red amanitas; eerily blue Stropharia cyanea to neon-orange Witches Butter - the forest was oozing fungus through every pore. On the ground, on down logs, on snags and stumps. We even found one little white mushroom that only grows on Douglas fir cones!

The boys attempted some fungal ID with field guides - but with over 10,000 species of fungi in the Pacific Northwest alone, and thousands of them under the umbrella of LBM’s (little brown mushrooms), it can be a lifetime undertaking to identify even a fraction of them. We noticed some mushrooms that themselves were falling into pieces and breaking down, and even some fungi-on-fungi action taking place! Ask your explorer if they remember the word for when a mushroom itself decomposes (rather than decomposes something else). It’s called deliquescing!

They had better luck identifying a large plant we found later: face-sized, vaguely-maple-shaped, flat leaves with a generous armor of brown thorns on both the leaves and the thick, lazy vine that supported them. Devil’s club, they concluded, one of few hazardous plants in Western Washington. And while it represents a hazard to humans and animals, it is also a sign of a robust wetland forest ecosystem. We all agreed to use our observation skills to avoid stumbling into the groves of toxic spikes.

Our next objective was learning a new game, called Spider’s Web. Ask your explorer how it’s played! Once the boys had exhausted their spider-channeling abilities, we played another game called The Art of Camouflage. After both of these games, we talked about the ideas of playing with honor and adopting successful strategies - all applicable to life outside of Explorer’s Club as well as in it. This transitioned into our closing circle of gratitude before we shouldered our packs, bid farewell to the fungus, and hiked home.