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Have pulled off the Egley Fire in Ochoco/Mauheur NF. Some nagging questions remain that I think all pickers need to be concerned about. Why were all the roads closed on this fire except the ones on its perimeter? The preliminary response I have receoived as to why the Forests bypassed Federal Regulations requiring them to post such proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register for public comment: sections of 36 CFR allow them to close roads without public comment if there are dangerous trees!
I have asked the Forest Service about surveys they did indicating ALL the closed roads had dangerous trees on them. From what I saw, most of the roads--especially the gravelled ones--had NO dangerous trees that could fall on the roadway. It appears that these roads were maintained as firebreaks and only had small saplings within 100 feet of the froadway. In many cases, identical-looking sections of the same road were open and closed.
The trend of closing entire fires or all roads on fires without public comment is growing--although the Ochoco/Malheur instance is extreme. How does this affect you? On the Egley fire, large crews of Asians and Mexicans (many of whom were not citizens and did not have green cards) violated the road closures with impunity, giving them a significant advantage over pickers who followed the closures. When exasperated white pickers tried to do the same thing, they were cited. In effect, this is a way to monopolize fires and keep the general population from having access to commercial quantities of mushrooms. If you don't want a repeat of this situation in future fires, you need to contact your local Federal legislators NOW and inform them of this problem and ask them to make Federal agencies post proposed rulemaking on fires (and other mushroom picking areas) in the Federal Register, as required.
Click here for contact information and letter suggestions.
As I was leaving the Delintment Lake area of the Egley Fire, I saw a crew picker in camp actually cutting root balls off a washtub full of tiny mushrooms. Where had many of the babies gone? We had been seeing scratch marks where 1-2 days earlier there had been patches of babies. This seemed to provide the answer!
By flooding the fire with 8 to 10 times the number of pickers that reasonably could have picked this fire, various buyers and companies actually reduced the crop by about 75% due to the raking of babies, trampling of productive areas and stepping on babies. One picker wryly commented that the babies that were harvested probably were the ones that would have made it--the remaining scattered babies in dry areas were growing very slowly or not at all.
Is it time for a lottery system for such fires? This system works fairly well in areas such as the ODNRA (Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area). In my view there is no alternative to this, although some companies have apparently suggested a parcel-auction system. The problem with the auction approach, however, is that large companies could buy up the fires and lock up production, leading to artifically low prices to pickers.
Click here for contact information and letter suggestions.
The recent demise of the Egley Fire above Burns should serve as a warning to those pulling the levers in the mushroom business!
While the fire was 150,000 acres plus, about 40,000 acres of it were completele worthless juniper/scrub. About 30,000 acres were "prime", the rest being an assortment of spotty ground of maginal commercial value.
This fire, like a similar fire in Silver Lake (about 100 miles away as the crow flies) years ago, could have been an excellent long-term producer of 3000-5000 pounds/day of good product. Unlike Silver Lake, however, a variety of blunders have rendered it but a shadow of what it could have been.
In the Silver Lake Fire, buyers like Carl Houk and the aggressive Dennis Morgan did NOT flood the fire with a thousand Asian and Mexican pickers. Rather, there were locals, circuit pickers and a few Asian and Mexican crews. Everyone did well, prices were reasonable for both sellers and buyers, and the locals were not antagonized by a horde of strangers fighting, tearing up the country, and crowding them out of picking spots.
The experience with the current fire in Malheur National Forest was far different. Some companies apparently broadcast the news so that every Asian and Mexican on the circuit (somewhere in the area of 1000) showed up at the same time. While Malheur had closed most of the roads on the fire, there was an early understanding that pickers could go on gravel roads but not on mud/dirt. As the swarm began tearing about at will, however, this understanding quickly evaporated and law enforcement began writing stacks of $200+ tickets. (There were few Caucasians on the fire--probably 1-2%. At one point it seeemed that virtually every white was getting a ticket...some said for quota reasons.)
The Forest Service planning for the human-wave influx was inadequate at best--possibly because none of the beneficiary companies bothered to tell them just how many pickers would be coming their way. Some 14 industrial camping sites had been specified. As these became overwhelmed, the mob srawled out. The Malheur response: tickets for "unauthorized camping".
Locals were never really brought into the equation. By the time they figured out what was going on the human swarm had brought in enough poundage so that prices crashed to as low as $3 and the locals could not make enough to pay for gas. But this "miracle" was not without a price--trampling of productive ground and widespread "baby raping" by crews (as happened earlier in Ukiah)--which subsequently led to many nights under 1000 pounds (total poundage for the area) and prices climbing back towards $8. Also, lack of financial reward and the sight of crew members fist fighting while waiting for permits created general anti-mushroomer sentiment that, apparently has taken root in the Malheur National Forest based on the semi-hostile response I got today when I called the Burns office and complained to the overwhelmed receptionist about crew vans and 4-wheelers in a supposedly closed road. I was told I (!) wasn't allowed in there!
For the record, there is NO WAY law enforcement can write enough tickets to keep the crews out of closed roads. And those who try to hike in (like me) get beat out almost every time by crews gambling they won't get caught and that they can beat tickets because they "can't read English".
Compounding the current Burns "picker-slum" problem is the failure of fires in Idaho and Montana to start up or produce to any extent as of this writing. Payette National Forest in Idaho still has much snow. The "Asiomex" army that was activated and sent into Ukiah and then Burns now has noplace to go and is stuck slamming the same ground for an increasingly declining return. If these people return home en masse it may be very difficult to get them to return later in the season with gas topping $5/gallon.
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