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Dave Neff

Superintendent

Start Date: 2012

Dave Neff has been hunting morel mushrooms since he was a kid. “My grandpa used to take us out with him, saying that since we were closer to the ground, we had better a better chance of finding them,” Neff says.

After years of hunting—and finding—his share of the tasty mushrooms, he’s refined his “mushroom eyes.” Once while walking a job site with an architect, he glanced down and spotted a morel next to the architect’s boot. Keeping a poker face, he didn’t flinch or harvest it then. “I walked back to my truck, dumped my lunch out of the plastic bag, and went back to that mushroom,” Neff says. “I found 90 in that spot.”

Some people say there are natural alarms that start the season, everything from blooming lilacs to dandelions popping up in their yard. For Neff, he looks for “umbrellas” in the woods. Once the may apples start spreading across the forest floor, Neff starts scouring the woods.

2020 will be remembered by most as the year of the pandemic. But even with COVID shutting many things down, Neff will remember this year as one that he found more than 400 morels.