Part 2 of a two-part survival story
In Part 1, we looked at what happens to your body when you barely eat for a week. Stanislav Volo spent six days lost and injured on Mount Habrich, rationing two bags of gummy bears and eating fireweed.
Which raises the obvious question:
If you were stuck in our mountains, what could you actually eat?
This isn't meant to be a complete guide to wild foods. These are edible plants, berries and mushrooms commonly encountered in North Shore and Sea-to-Sky forests — things worth learning to positively identify before you ever need them.
BERRIES — START HERE
If you're looking for survival calories, berries are a good place to start. Salmonberries, thimbleberries, huckleberries, blueberries and salal are all found in our forests. Salal is highest in calories and can be found just about everywhere here.
Unlike most mushrooms, berries provide something particularly useful when you're running low on food: carbohydrate and sugar. A handful isn't dinner, but it is readily available energy.
Rose hips are another option later in the season. The fleshy outer portion is edible, although the hairy material and seeds inside are generally removed. They have 3X more calories than Salal.
FIREWEED
Stanislav actually ate fireweed, and it's a useful plant to recognize. Young shoots, leaves and flowers are edible, although older plants become tougher and more bitter. It's about 20-30 calories per 100g.
FUN FACT 🍯: Fireweed is also an exceptional nectar source for bees and produces a prized, light-coloured honey. Those enormous pink patches that colonize disturbed and burned areas can become huge nectar fields.
NOW THE MUSHROOMS 🍄
Our coastal forests are spectacular mushroom habitat. Boletes, chanterelles, pine mushrooms, lobster mushrooms, chicken of the woods and Hericium or bearded-tooth mushrooms are all encountered in our region.
But here's the surprising survival lesson:
Mushrooms aren't particularly good survival calories - cause they are 90% water!
Even a mushroom that looks like a substantial meal may provide surprisingly little energy.
BOLETES
Boletes are easy to recognize as a group because instead of ordinary blade-like gills underneath the cap, they have a sponge-like layer of tiny pores.
If you're going to learn one edible type, learn the king bolete / porcini-type boletes. Look for a brown cap, thick pale stem, white to cream-coloured pores when young, and white flesh inside. The pores often become yellowish or olive as the mushroom ages.
The important distinction is that not every bolete is edible. Avoid boletes with red or orange-red pores, and don't use blue staining as your deciding test — both edible and inedible species can turn blue when cut.
So for a beginner, the useful mental picture is:
Brown cap. Thick pale stem. White or cream sponge underneath. White flesh. No red pores.
CHANTERELLES, PINES, LOBSTERS & THE GOOD STUFF
Chanterelles have characteristic blunt folds or ridges underneath rather than ordinary blade-like gills. Pine mushrooms, also known as matsutake, are another prized local edible — high-quality specimens can sell for around $65 per pound.
Lobster mushrooms are hard to miss. Their brilliant orange-red exterior looks remarkably like a cooked lobster shell. Interestingly, the “lobster” is actually the result of the parasitic fungus Hypomyces lactifluorum transforming another mushroom underneath.
Chicken of the woods forms spectacular orange and yellow shelves growing from wood, while Hericium or bearded-tooth mushrooms produce masses of hanging white teeth or spines.
All are edible when correctly identified and appropriately prepared.
SO HOW MANY CALORIES ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?
These are approximate calories per 100 grams of fresh food. Species, ripeness and water content vary, so think of these as comparisons rather than exact numbers.
WILD FOOD APPROX. CALORIES / 100 g
Plants
Rose hips~ 160
Fireweed 20–30
Berries
Salal berries 60–80
Huckleberries / blueberries 50–60
Salmonberries 45–55
Thimbleberries 45–55
Mushrooms
Chicken of the woods 30–40
Hericium / bearded tooth 30–40
Chanterelles 30–40
Boletes 25–40
Pine mushrooms 25–35
Lobster mushrooms 25–35
Look at those numbers and something becomes obvious: berries are generally much better survival fuel than mushrooms. They provide carbohydrates and sugars, while fresh mushrooms are mostly water and relatively low in calories.
Rose hips are particularly interesting at around 160 calories per 100 grams, although eating 100 grams of cleaned rose hips is quite a lot of fruit.
Now you also know why bears spend so much time eating berries instead of mushrooms. During late summer and fall, black bears are trying to consume enormous amounts of energy, so calories matter. If you've ever seen a pile of black bear scat absolutely packed with berry seeds, you've seen the evidence.
Spend enough time eating berries yourself and, well… your poop might start looking a little more like theirs too. 💩🐻
LITTLE BROWN MUSHROOMS CAN KILL YOU
Here's where the stakes change.
Some of British Columbia's dangerous mushrooms don't look dangerous at all. Deadly Amanitas, deadly Galerina and other mushrooms containing amatoxins occur here.
The British Columbia Coroners Service has previously warned about wild mushrooms following a fatal amanitin poisoning involving an 18-year-old. Amatoxin poisoning is particularly frightening because symptoms can be delayed. A person can become violently ill and then appear to improve while severe liver damage continues.
A ring around the stem — what most people would simply call a skirt — occurs on several dangerous mushrooms. But a skirt does not automatically mean poisonous, and poisonous mushrooms don't necessarily have one.
So this is a memory aid, not an identification rule:
IF IT HAS A SKIRT, YOU MIGHT HIT THE DIRT. FOREVER.
If you're looking at a mushroom thinking, “I'm pretty sure…”, don't eat it.
THE SURVIVAL MATH
After several days without enough food, anything starts to look like dinner. Trust us, we’ve all looked at a grouse on the trail and thought about it. They’re not exactly hard to outsmart. 😂
But hunger changes your decision-making, and this is where the math matters. That mushroom you’re not quite sure about might give you 30 calories. Getting it wrong could give you liver failure. That’s a terrible trade.
Stanislav survived six days with two bags of gummy bears, some fireweed and his body’s own stored energy. He didn’t need to replace every calorie he was burning. He needed to stay alive long enough to get out.
So learn the berries, plants and mushrooms that grow where you actually travel. Pick a handful and learn them extremely well. More importantly, carry emergency calories so hunger never pressures you into gambling on something you can’t identify. Hungry is uncomfortable. Poisoned is an emergency.
Maybe Stanislav just channelled his inner bear. He sheltered in a cave, ate plants and survived on the gelatinous marvel of modern food science that is the gummy bear. Six days later, he walked out.
Perhaps the bears have been trying to teach us something all along: find shelter, conserve energy and eat the highest-calorie thing you can find. 🐻
PHOTOS:
1. Red Salmon berries
2. Salmon berries, blueberries, red huckleberries
3. Wild Blueberries
4. Huckleberry
5. Rose hip
6. Thimbleberry
7. Pine Mushroom
8. Salal Berries
9. Fireweed
10. Bolete
11. Chicken of the woods
12. Chanterelles
13. Poisonous - Ramaria Pallida
14. Coral Tooth Fungus - Hericium
15. Lobster Mushroom
16. Soapberry
17. Poisonous Amanita Muscaria
18. Poisonous Amanita Muscaria