Shroom Boom

In the summer of 2015, thousands of people flocked to the remote forests of the Northwest Territories in search of a crop potentially worth a lot of cash. These nomadic pickers, some of them professional, many of them mysterious backdoor tourists from around the globe, were not there to harvest marijuana. Rather, they were involved in another kind of undocumented commerce which, it turns out, is big business. The mysterious morel mushroom is an ingredient sought-after by some of the finest restaurants and French chefs in the world. For reasons scientists, climatologists, botanists and seasoned pickers can't quite explain, the morel mushroom magically appears on the scorched earth the year following a forest fire. In 2014, 385 wildfires charred 3.4 million hectares of Northwest Territories' boreal forests making it one of the worst wildfire seasons in documented history. As a result, thousands of mushroom hunters flocked like prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush. Vice sent Adam Gollner to Northern Canada, where the sun sets at midnight, to investigate the underground market of the elusive morel and see why these nomadic pickers have a reputation for being wilder than the mushrooms they hunt.