Hosted by Tom Volk, volk.thom@uwlax.edu, 608-785-6972 http://TomVolkFungi.net
Department of Biology, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

If you’ve never been to La Crosse before, you’re missing something special. La Crosse is in western Wisconsin in the driftless area, left untouched by glaciers that flattened most of Wisconsin and Minnesota 10,000 years ago. With the Mississippi River to the west, La Crosse sits on a floodplain, with 500-600 ft. bluffs to the east. It’s a very beautiful place with some unusual fungi. Even the beer commercials call it “God’s Country.” La Crosse is about 2.5 hr from the east side of Madison, perhaps 4 hr from Milwaukee, and about 2.5 hr from the MSP airport.

We’ll meet at the Cowley Hall parking lot at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse at 11am and travel to collect. Depending on the weather and rains we’ll most likely go to West Salem, Wisconsin, about 15 miles east of La Crosse, where we will collect in an American Chestnut forest. American chestnuts? How did they get here? About 1910 a farmer from Pennsylvania planted 11 America chestnut trees from seeds he had brought with him. Those trees have multiplied to about 5000 chestnut trees with a diameter of more than 5 inches, plus lots of smaller ones. The stand was free from the chestnut blight until about 1988. Read more about chestnut blight at http://www.botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/may98.html or start from http://www.tomvolkfungi.net/. I am in the middle of a biodiversity project in the chestnuts, so your collections will aid in that survey. Depending on the weather and the mushrooms, we might go to one or more of several sites, possibly Perrot State Park on the Mississippi River or Hixon Forest.

If you’re nice to me, there could be a place for you to stay overnight if you come from out of town. Make sure I know about that before the foray though. There are also many local hotels if you want to stay overnight. I hope you can come!

Tom Volk
volk.thom@uwlax.edu