Mushroom Hunting in Philadelphia

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Yesterday, I was disappointed after a long stroll through the Wissahickon watershed, to have found only a few species of fungi. As a novice hunter, perhaps I was too much encouraged by the luck of finding three handsome King Boletes, simply in passing while a made the rounds of cabins at a summer camp. My half-day of scrambling up and down the canyon of the Wissahickon yielded the discovery of only two interesting mushrooms, one lily-shaped and two-toned redish and yellowish, on a log under pines; the other, a delicate, almost translucent pink, 3" wide, adnate and broad-gilled - neither with obvious identification in the Audubon field guide I am using.

If the Wissahickon is a good place at all to search, I think the location of the second mushroom, above the Baptismal Pool (site 17 on the Wissahickon trail maps) on the SW side of the creek, looks most promising. It's an interesting kind of bluff that's isolated from the surrounding slopes and features more plateau area than most of the canyon 'walls'. Isolation may be important because of possible fungicides leaching into the Wissahickon. There's even an intriguing bowl at the center of the plateau, large enough for a dozen people at a camp fire…