Captain Video's Mountain Retreat

This is turning into a modern Magic 8 Ball :)

What are you?

It rains here in the Northwest, and when it rains you get mushrooms. I'm not a mushroom hunter and while I'd like to learn more about mycology and mushroom info, I'm a total noob. I found these in the backyard about a month ago -- there was probably a hundred different species of mush out there, and I just grabbed a few of the really big ones to see if I could figure out what they were.

This one's the first I found, right outside the door -- a ton of them. I wasn't able to figure out what it was, so I'm not even going to guess here.

The big umbrella shaped mushroom and the spherical topped one are the same type -- just different ages. This was big, about the size of my hand. It was a gilled mushroom that dropped a huge amount of white spores.

This second one is a Bolete of some kind -- I'm guessing it might be a Zeller's Bolete?

I had no idea what a "Bolete" was, and didn't even know that mushroom's can have pores instead of gills. This thing was really heavy and solid feeling and I'm thinking I'd like to get some help to confirm an ID for it -- in case it's a good edible. I did take a spore print from it and the spores were a dark olive green/brown color.

It's not as slimy as it looks in the photo - it was raining out when I picked it. The color darkened and took on a more matte finish as it dried off.

This was another Bolete -- I think it falls into a group that's pretty widely knows as a "Slippery Jack."

I grabbed it because it was so freakish. This one is way more slimy than it looks in the photo. The slime was really viscus and reminded me of using methylcellulose to do stuff like alien drool.

I didn't take a lot of notes -- I took a lot of pictures -- but I was working out of an old, and pretty difficult to use mushroom book, so I was just messing around. I've gotten newer (and way better) books on the topic, and I've found a local mycological club, so I'm hoping I can start to grok some of this strange stuff that grows so profusely here.

When I lived in Minnesota I picked up a lot of local knowledge about wild edibles -- not really much about mushrooms other than puffballs -- but definitely a lot of different plant types. Things like, where and when to find them, how to prepare them, etc. The Pacific Northwest seems completely different, and the micro-climates here seem to really complicate the "knowing where and when to find things" issue.

So, a question... If you grow up here, did your older siblings make you eat a slug?