Fungi of the Sierra Norte

Drove into the Sierra Norte in the morning when the cloud was still low. The pine-oak forests up here are some of the most biodiverse in North America, and the fungal communities follow the complexity of the trees — both in species and in the density of the underground networks.

Found three species I couldn't immediately identify: a small brown Cortinarius-adjacent thing growing from buried roots, what might be a Russula but with an unusual olive cap, and something that looked like an Amanita muscaria in the way that a distant relative looks like someone you know — the family resemblance is there but something is translated.

The local Zapotec communities have been gathering these forests for centuries. There are names in Zapotec for fungi that have no Spanish equivalent — names that describe not just the species but the relationship between the fungus and the forest and the time of year and the specific place. That kind of knowledge takes generations to build and can disappear in one.

I sat in the mist for a while and ate the lunch I'd packed and tried to learn the names of the trees.