Buttle Lake mushrooms

And here are some of the mushrooms from the shore of Buttle Lake.

Purple caps, cream gills; probably Russula sp.

Probably another Russula

Big mushroom, tiny mushroom.

These are quite small, and the bottom of the cap is hairy.

The common Red-belted polypore. I wonder if the tiny ones above are another species, or just baby Reds.

Small, pale mushrooms on a rotted log. With Douglas-fir needles for scale.

One of the Amanitas.

Almost pure white. Russula brevipes?

I have on my desk at the moment, two guides to mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest. One, "Common Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest" has 74 pages of mushrooms, mostly two per page: about 140 species. The other, a small folder with only 53 mushrooms, titled "Edible Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest" (although it includes 5 deadly poisonous ones). Of these, 20 are not included in the larger guide, and others are included with different names, both Latin and common.

As soon as I think I've identified a mushroom, I look it up in the other guide and find another look-alike. And then there's the Audubon mushroom guide: it has mushrooms (700+) from all over the continent, but even when I think I know the species, the descriptions don't match.

Confusing!