Colorado’s latest tool to fight forest fires: Mushrooms
GOLD HILL — Zach Hedstrom kneels on the forest floor, scraping at the 2-inch-deep duff of lodgepole pine needles and pine cones disassembled by squirrels, looking to see whether ghostly fibers of mycelium are quietly consuming the hillside.
This would be a good thing.
A mushroom-based takeover of a sunny plot previously thinned for wildfire mitigation is actually the goal, not a horror movie nightmare. The fingers of mycelium can claw their way through wood chips, sawdust and broken branches, and quickly break down wood into a damp, fecund strata that promotes plant regeneration at the same time it blocks wildfire.
What Hedstrom uncovers for an assembly of two dozen Boulder County forestry experts is an inspiring layer of devil’s food cake crumbs shot through with white mycelium strands. Compared to a dusty gray, hard-packed sheet of sand a few feet away that was never treated with fungus, the dark soil is a veritable rainforest.
“You can feel this and it’s actually spongy to the touch,” Hedstrom says, as the murmuring crowd nods and reaches reverently for soil that is apparently on a miraculous journey back to health.