Floatplanes, Canoes & Matsutake

Pacific Rim Mushrooms started long before there was a company name. It started in the mid-90s with a backpack, a knife and a lot of walking through the forests of British Columbia, looking for wild Morels and Pine mushrooms (Matsutake).

We still have a box of photos from those years. Most of them have never been online. We are going to share them here, a few at a time, along with what those seasons taught us about mushrooms.

The best patches were never near a road

Anyone who has picked mushrooms knows the rule: if a patch is easy to reach, someone has already been there. The good ground was always further in. That meant floatplanes into lakes, canoes up rivers, old trucks on logging roads and a lot of hiking over fallen timber.

The weather did not care about our plans. We picked in rain, in bright sun and sometimes in the first snow of the season. Some trips the canoe was loaded with gear on the way in and with mushrooms on the way out.

Morels and Matsutake

Our first harvests were Morels and Pine mushrooms. They are two very different mushrooms with two very different seasons, and each one teaches you something.

Morels taught us patience. You can walk for an hour and see nothing, then find them everywhere once your eyes adjust. Pine mushrooms taught us care. They are judged on shape, firmness and how closed the cap is, so the way you pick and pack them matters as much as finding them.

You learn what “good” looks like by handling thousands of mushrooms, one at a time.

Camp life and buying stations

A picking season was not just picking. It was cooking dinner on a camp stove after a long day, drying out gear by the fire and getting up early to do it again. It was also the buying stations, where pickers brought in their harvest to be sorted, weighed and packed.

Those buying stations are where we learned the business side: grading, handling and getting mushrooms from the forest to people who wanted them, quickly and in good shape.

From the forest to a company

In 2005 that work became Pacific Rim Mushrooms, founded in Vancouver. We bought from pickers across BC and supplied Pine mushrooms, Morels, Chanterelles and Porcini to chefs, retailers and mushroom lovers around the world.

Where it led

Years of working with mushrooms pointed us toward a new direction: Reishi, Lion’s Mane, Cordyceps, Turkey Tail and Chaga. Today we make extracts from organically grown fruiting bodies, the same part of the mushroom we spent all those seasons handling.

The forests are where we learned to look closely and not cut corners. We still judge every batch that way.

More stories from the archive are coming, including our years running a shop in Richmond. If you picked in BC back then, we would love to hear from you.