One year ago today Ranger Ken Davis at Staircase stomped my mushrooms and I'm still mad as hell about it. I was well within the legal limit of one quart in the national park. He greatly upset me and my 7 year old daughter.
In commemoration of that event I have removed the song that was over the original audio so now everyone can hear what transpired
Park service poaching old growth cedar from Shady Lane Nature Trail at Staircase
Park service poaching old growth cedar from Shady Lane Nature Trail at Staircase
Park service using a wheeled device to poach old growth cedar
from Shady Lane Nature Trail at Staircase
No wheeled devices allowed on Shady Lane Nature trail at stair case.
Ken Davis takes Olympia assignment
Ken Davis, a Blount resident and a ranger in Cades Cove for the past 17 years, is taking a new assignment in March. He will continue the same type of work in Olympia National Park in Washington state, a park where he started out as a seasonal ranger.
Here he has been involved in law enforcement and the parks medic program. Before Cades Cove, he spent two years on the North Carolina side of the park at 20 Mile.
A native of Michigan, he has also served at Jean Lafitte Historical Park in Louisiana and Independence National Park in Philadelphia, Pa.
Ken has established an enviable record of service here, both in the park and in working with local agencies. We wish him well.
most of us see them this way (Gomphidius sub roseus)
We had to go back to staircase today because my little on lost her toy out there yesterday and it was a special toy that we bought in China. I did not want to go back there ever, after the B.S. I endured yesterday, but for the sake of my child, I went back. ( I left in a hurry yesterday because I was upset with the Ranger and that is probably when the toy was lost.) I brought my husband with me to Staircase this time. I went through the campground looking for the toy but I did not spend much time looking because I did not want to have another run in with Ranger Jobsworth. My husband waited in the car while we looked.
A ranger pulled through the campground while I was looking for the toy, I did not look to see what ranger it was. If it was Rangers Jobsworth I sure did not want to make eye contact with him and start another big hassle.
Anyway we could not find the toy and my husband is very weak and ill today, so I sent my daughter in to the ranger station to ask if her toy had been found. I did not want to go in there and speak to Mr. Jobsworth if he was in there, so I waited at the car with my ill husband.
So my little one went into the rangers station to ask if her toy had been found. Then Mr. Jobsworth himself came marching out to our car. Great.. just great.. I had no desire to speak to that prick, so I let my husband do the talking and I just watched. Ranger jobsworth pretended to be a nice guy and offered to fill out a lost and found report. He even offered to go fetch it, but before he left to get the report he eyeballed the inside of my car and finding nothing he then asked me if I had picked any mushrooms. I had not, I'll never pick mushrooms at Staircase again after that carry on yesterday. (even though it's perfectly legal to pick mushrooms there) I shook my head "no" so then he asked if I was just taking pictures and I nodded my head yes.. then he asked if I had picked mushrooms in the national forest and I shook my head no.. Sheesh.. you would think it was a crime to pick any mushroom anywhere by the way he acted.
After he fetched the lost and found form and brought it back to our car and finished filling it out ( he spelled the word dinosaur "dinasor") he started in on me again. He asked me to come away from my husband so he could talk to me. I refused, I said "no, I'm staying right here with my husband" So then he asked me to shut the driver side door in the back where my daughter was sitting, I was standing up at the drivers door. After I shut the door he came over and peered into my open backpack on the drivers seat and started once again demanding to know if I had any mushrooms and accusing me of hiding from him and being dishonest and so forth. He also demanded to know why we did not come to him for help. Uh, we did come to him for help, but not until after trying to find the toy without his help. Now this is total B.S., we were a family there to retrieve a lost toy AND mushroom picking is not illegal and I had not hid from the Ranger Jobsworth. My husband thinks that Ranger jobsworth was trying to egg me on... well he failed, I did not bite. I have all of this on video.
My husband says that while my daughter and I were looking for her toy in the campground, this same Ranger was going around to every car in the park demanding something from the passengers. I don't know what he was demanding. I know that he never once looked at my dash to see if I had a parks pass; all he cared about was mushrooms, maybe he was checking for passes, or maybe he was checking for mushrooms.. Who knows? The guy is an absolute prick who harasses law abiding families who come to enjoy the park and relax on a Sunday afternoon, that's all I know for sure.
There's no joy left at Staircase now that Ken Davis is in charge. We won't be going back unless we hear that he has moved on. Luckily I don't go there much anyway because I like to hike with my dog, and dogs are not allowed on trails in the National Park.
We left staircase immediately after the interrogation finished and we went into the National Forest to try to get some relaxation but my husband was too freaked out by the whole thing so we went way down by Big Creek to look for my daughter's toy in another place that we had stopped at yesterday and we found some Chanterelles there, funny they were old ones and we did not find any there yesterday. When I came back down to the car with mushrooms my husband freaked out and wanted me to throw them away. That's a what prick this ranger is, my husband is now afraid when I pick mushrooms in the National Forest. Well I'm not about to stop picking mushrooms in the National Forest, I know the laws and I'm not scared. But I don't need any B.S., either, so I won't be going back to Staircase any time soon.
This Ranger is the new head of the district, his name is Ken Davis and he has a southern accent. Perhaps where he comes from picking mushrooms is a foreign concept? If he's going to be a Ranger in the Pacific Northwest he's just going to have to get over the fact that people pick mushrooms here AND it's perfectly legal to harvest one quart of mushrooms per person per day in the National park.
While I was in the campsite today I took a picture of the mushrooms he smashed yesterday. You can clearly see that I had less then a quart of mushrooms.
Boletus Zelleri that Ranger Jobsworth smashed because he thought I could not ID it
Another reason to avoid staircase this winter
I can't ID these for sure without a spore print and can't pick
them to get a spore print according to Ranger jobsworth
Lake Cusham is the lowest I have ever seen it, people used to jump off this rock (Party Rock)
in the summer, I never thought it looked particularly safe though
these are the mushrooms that Ranger Davis felt the need to steal and stomp on
"Jobsworth of the Week" Ranger Davis demonstrates how to stomp a mushroom in the name of conservation because it's what congress would have wanted..
Not much out there today... I found some Matsutake stumps and a rotten cauliflower that someone had cut to pieces. The only good edible I found today was a hedgehog. I took home a big white mushroom to identify, it smells nice.
To end the day I decided to go out to Staircase in Olympic National Park and have a picnic lunch. I've been teaching my little one how wonderful it is that we have ONP and showed it to her on google earth so she could see the difference between ONP and all the logged over lands outside of it.
I had my mushroom ID book and lichen ID book with me so I grabbed a few tiny mushrooms from the campground (you know, the place where even dogs are allowed?) so I could key them out and then probably leave them in the park. But along came a jobsworth of a ranger to ruin my day. He stopped and wanted to know what I was doing. I told him I was taking a mushroom class and he flipped his lid... he told me I need a permit to pick anything in the park. Then he demanded my ID and spent far too long in his truck waiting for his radio to tell him that I have no criminal history. From the amount of time he took he must have been running my name "all ways" in a desperate attempt to try to find anything he could. Gosh I bet that really disappointed him. Sorry, I'm not a criminal, but I just happen to be one most outspoken conservationists in the county. It was freaking cold out there and me and my daughter were shivering while we waited for him to do his B.S. with the radio. Does anyone know what frequency they use up at staircase?
I argued with him a bit when he tried to lie to me about the rules. You don't need a permit for picking mushrooms for personal use and yet he demanded to see my permit, presumably in an attempt to intimidate me. Anyway I guess he is used to the way most Americans suck up to anyone in a uniform. What it all boils down to is, if I had lied and said I was picking for the table he would have said I was within the law but since I told him I was taking a mushroom class and doing science (and he did not believe me) he threatened me with a ticket and forced me to dump out my 1/2 cup of tiny mushrooms. Then he stomped the helpless little mushrooms into the ground in front of me and my daughter. Nice job.. stomping mushrooms in the name of conservation, and in front of a child. That's the way to protect our national heritage, I'm sure this is what congress had in mind!
His logic was that the mushrooms could be poison and you can't pick stuff unless you know exactly what it is because if it turns out to be poison you can't eat it and then you've committed a crime, because you can't pick stuff you're not gonna eat. Can you say fungiphobia? So following this logic, I guess that first chanterelle I picked out at Staircase in 2004 was illegally picked because I was not certain it was a chanterelle. Yes I took it home and ID'ed it before I ate it. GOD FORBID!!! What if I let one of the many chanterelles I have picked out there over the years rot in the fridge before I could eat it? Would that be a crime? A rotten chanterelle is poisonous. What about the maggoty parts of mushrooms that I cut off and composted? Isn't it a crime to remove maggots from ONP since they are animals and not the fruiting bodies of plants? Where exactly do we draw the line Mr. Jobsworth?
Most mushrooms are not poisonous, but you can't really expect a jobsworth of a LEO to know that, even if he just happens to work in ONP which just happens to be the most fabulous mushroom garden on the entire planet. He should go back to Alabama or what ever southern state he is from and learn something about mushrooms (and humanity) before he comes back out here.
Mr. Jobsworth stomped on the Boletus zelleri that my daughter was wanting to eat. Before that, my youngest wanted to be a park ranger but now she's having second thoughts. She loves mushrooms and does not want a job that requires her to stomp on edible mushrooms. I told her she could be a nice back country ranger ( like Ranger Bruce who also works at Staircase and is a nice person) but she would have to clean out outhouses if she was a back country ranger. So now she has decided she wants the Rangers job of "sitting at the place with the red light and taking people's money".
Shit like this makes me glad that Dosewallips never re-opened. I can hike in there and look at all the empty ranger buildings and falling down "no parking" signs and have the place all to myself. Staircase used to be closed during the winter; I wish it still was. With the rangers in there all the time the Elk are gone. Back when Staircase was closed in the winter I could count on seeing elk during every hike. I wonder where the elk go now that the rangers have spoiled their winter habitat?
I avoid Staircase like the plague in the summer, it's a horrible noisy zoo at that time. I always wait until winter to go there, but now even during winter Staircase is not so much fun.
Anyway, now that I've got that off my chest I'll upload some pictures I took today, including a picture of a badly vandalized tree in Olympic National Forest where the only law enforcement is to cart off undocumented salal pickers.
I spotted a yew tree in the campground at Staircase, I have only learned how to identify them this quarter, I also spotted many other things that I can now name, thanks to the class I am in. I love classes like this that open my eyes and help me to see things. I never got that out of my "Temperate Rainforests" class but "The Fungal Kingdom" has taught me a lot. This class is so very much better than my experience with Temperate Rainforests. Both classes are upper division science, but this class is run well and I'm learning all kinds of things and I'm very happy with it. Maybe I won't be so frightened of upper division science after the nice experience I have had with this class.
Now this really should be a crime!
This bark was left in a hole in the ground. Is the vandal planning on coming back to get it? See the
tree this recently removed from below...
Vandalized cedar tree. Was this the work of a basket maker? At least they did not girdle the tree so it will live, but where the hell are the forest rangers when they are actually needed? How could someone do all of this without being caught?
Oh wait, maybe this is legal because they did not actually remove the bark from the park and they probably already
knew that it was cedar bark, so they did not have to ID it to see if it was poison.
I now know that it is Usnea longissima that has prompted me to take so many photos of this tree over the years
Ranger Davis stomped these into the ground while invoking the name of congress
Ranger Davis did not stomp these, perhaps he should go back and give them a good stomping just to be safe
Ranger Davis did not stomp these because they are protected from him by Olympic National Forest.
I don't know what they are, but they are growing in a possible Peltigera membranacea lichen
I think this lichen at Staircase is Sphaerophorus globosus but I'm probably wrong
Xylaria hypoxylon fungus at Staircase (common name candlesnuff fungus)
fairy vomit lichen on an old growth stump, I hope the tree was stomped before it could be removed form the park
Unknown lichen, maybe an Usnea spp
I've never seen Lake Cushman so low and I've never seen these stumps with branches on them before. I certainly hope that Ranger Davis was around to stomp the city of Tacoma for doing this the the North Fork Skokomish River Valley. Of course, one individual picking an fungus to ID is a terrible crime compared to what the greedy corporations and cities have done to this once beautiful valley.
Stereocaulon spp lichen, all kinds of wonderful lichens grow in this spot next to the road
These fresh Matsutake stumps were the only Matsutake I found today, oh well, at least I got to smell it
