Huckleberry Season
This morning I sat down by the campfire and ate great big huckleberry pancakes with my hands as they came straight out of a giant cast-iron skillet (prepared by our resident Fire Goddess). When I got back into town this afternoon, I learned from the Seattle Times that we’d jumped the gun on huckleberry season, which officially starts tomorrow.
I spent the weekend camping out near Skykomish, in the Mount-Baker Snoqualmie National Forest. On Saturday morning, we drove out to the Lake Valhalla trailhead (about which, more later). We had a lovely hike, along the way discovering large patches of huckleberry bushes, covered with ripe berries. On the hike out, we filled a 1 liter Nalgene bottle with huckleberries and threw them in a cooler for breakfast the next morning.
Hiking up, I couldn’t resist taking an occasional break to pick a few berries to munch on. This was my first real experience with huckleberries and they were quite a delightful surprise. (Due to very dry weather last year, I came back from a berry-picking trip to Tonga Ridge without a single berry.) They look very similar to blueberries, but have a distinct flavor of their own, which is very tart but also slightly floral. Delicious to eat in their simplest form, but also wonderful in pancakes.
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I just got back from a trip to Tonga Ridge and there’s a crapload of huckleberries. We came back with a pound of them. Would have got more if we had brought more bags to put them in. They are all over!