(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, our regional sky islands are a mecca for mushroom hunters.

(Hernan) My grandmother said, "Hey, there's this big mushroom conference in the White Mountains.

Would you like to go to that?"

I said, "Well, I've never been to anything like that, but sure."

I just came out here and I fell in love with this.

(Tom) I'll look back at the science and recovery after the Big Horn fire.

(Don) The big concern here, that it was a big fire with a lot of areas and very, very high severity effect, (Tom) Creating an outdoor urban art gallery in Nogales.

(Priscilla) The main purpose of Nogaleria was to change the narrative, like having something out there for Nogales people.

(Tom) And learn why Grotto Hill is architect Bill Draper's favorite place.

(Bill) I regularly visit this place to reminisce my early days.

And to enjoy the open vistas and sunsets that slowly set over this peaceful community.

(Tom) Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and today we're joining you from Mount Lemmon, one of Arizona's sky islands.

You know, in this region, mountains can rise more than 6,000 feet above the surrounding area.

And this is also home to all kinds of plant life, animal life, and fungi.

Matter of fact, back in 2019, we went to the White Mountains for the annual Arizona Mushroom Society Foray.

Where all kinds of mushrooms are harvested, eaten, and more.

(rain pelting on windshield) (rain pelting on windshield) (sound of wipers going across windshield) (background talking of group) (organ instrumental music) - [Male Speaker] Wow.

- [Female Speaker] Aren't they beautiful?

(organ instrumental music) (thunder rolling) - [Dr. Leathers] Okay, my name is Doctor Chester Leathers, I'm a professor, retired.

Well, I founded the Arizona Mushroom Club about 35 years ago.

I held the office of president, treasurer, corresponding secretary, financier, et cetera.

I enjoyed the study of mushrooms under the world's authority, Dr Alexander Smith.

He was filled with enthusiasm.

I probably inherited some of that enthusiasm from him.

I am still interested in fungi and the mushrooms, and hope to continue, although I'm 91.

I hope to continue for another 10 years.

(sounds of group talking) (sounds of group talking) - [Noah] Every single one of these holes here, is where a rodent dug up a truffle or you know, a hypogeous fungus.

A hypogeous means below ground.

A hypogeous fungus and ate it.

And, so they eat these things, and you know, spread the spores all over, so we're just looking for that, and we're going to these places and raking back the duff.

And, there they are!

- [Voice In Group] Look at that!

- And so, we can rake it back a little bit more, there's another one.

- [Voice In Group] Wow!

- But, when you have all digs concentrated in an area like this, you have a potential for a lot of truffles.

- [Voice In Group] There's another one!

- There's a whole nest of 'em.

And, then yet, so you know, and also once you're done, just cover that area back up.

Do your landscaping, replace your divots.

In a few days- - [Alissa] So, the whole process to dying with mushrooms can be very simple.

You have to acquire the mushrooms, and then you break them up into small pieces, and you simmer them for about an hour.

And, that allows all of the dye molecules to extract from the fungus, and, just swim around into the dye liquid.

And, then you put your fiber in there, and then you have dyed fiber.

And, these mushroom dyes work best with protein-based fibers so, we're talking wool, silk, alpaca.

If you want to get into mushroom dying, you wanna look at your protein fibers for the best results.

(footsteps on mud) - [Male In Group] Who are you with?

- [Female In Group] Arizona Mushroom Society.

We go on forays all over the place.

- [Terri] This is a Cortinarius, and, Cortinarius and Amanita are the two most deadly of all mushrooms, and so.

And Corts are very hard to tell but, so, you want to like, just learn a few simple ones and stay with those for a while.

And, the safest one is this one right here.

- [Female In Black Jacket] But they were in the same bag so, you probably wouldn't eat it anymore.

- [Terri] No, it's all right.

It's not that, you're gonna cook it.

You're gonna cook it well.

Cook that cap and eat it, and then, this is nice and fresh, you could cook that, you could even eat the stem, here.

But, just clean it up.

Unless it's buggy and then just cut it off.

- [Dr. Leathers] Most people have an association with store bought varieties and species of mushrooms.

I haven't tasted anything on the shelves that I would say compares to naturally occurring mushrooms.

- [Male In T-Shirt] These are all edible, except for I don't know, these three here, I don't know if they are.

But, all this is all edible, yeah.

- [Male In Plaid Shirt] And so, this is a honey mushroom.

- [Male In T-Shirt] Yep, these are honeys, yep.

Where's your basket at?

- [Male In Plaid Shirt] Come here.

(background laughter) - [Male In T-Shirt] Okay, yeah, that's amera there.

- [Male In Plaid Shirt] Yeah, we find this, this looks like cauliflower.

- [Male In T-Shirt] But this is (mumbled), just try a little bit of it first.

Yeah, you guys did good.

- [Female Speaker] You did really good.

- [Chad] Again, I'm an obsessive mushroom hunter and I always have way too many mushrooms.

And so, I was looking for new ideas on how to use them, because even as a chef, I kind of fall back on the same ideas all the time.

Another thing is, I wanted to explore, there's a lot of mushrooms that are popular in other cultures that are not popular here.

Huitlacoche is a fungus that grows on corn.

Each little kernel gets filled with this fungus and it's really kind of scary looking.

And, when American farmers find it, they basically tear out their crops because they think it's the end of the world.

In Mexico when they find it, they do a happy dance and they go to the market cause they know they can sell it for 10 times as much as they can sell the corn.

So, I thought it would be a fun one to share with you guys.

- [Chad] The one edible that seems to be everywhere is the aspen bolete Leccinum, and so, I made this leather with a bunch of Leccinum.

I want you guys to taste this.

Yeah, you can pass those out now.

It's actually pretty dense, and it becomes a pretty filling snack if you take it with you.

(large crowd chatter) (large crowd chatter) (group talking at a distance) - [Herman] This is a hat that is made from the amadou mushroom.

I got it from a guy in Romania.

There's only eight people in the world that can make this hat.

I've been coming here for about three years, already.

Just basically here to learn more about mushrooms, and to forage, and just be part of the mycophile community.

In the conference room I have basically, a table that I set up at my market in Tucson.

And, it's got all my extracts for pain, for anxiety, for sleep, for the immune system, for nerve regeneration.

All these extracts are mostly mushroom-based.

My dad had three consecutive strokes, and he had partial paralysis in his body.

The doctors kind of just sent him home that way and said, "You know, we can't really help him get any better."

It kind of destroyed his life.

He went into a depression because of that.

I decided at that moment that I would do something to help my dad.

Upon all this research that I did, I came across a mushroom, it's called Lion's Mane, and he was taking the extract that I made.

After six months, he says, "Son, hey, I can move my fingers again."

He started moving his hand.

Slowly, he recovered all the parts of his body that had paralysis, previously.

That mushroom kind of lead me to other mushrooms.

And, that's how I got into the mushroom thing.

After my dad recovered from paralysis, my grandmother said, "Hey, there's this big mushroom conference in the White Mountains."

"Would you like to go to that?"

And, I said, "Well, I've never been to anything like that, but sure."

And, I just came out here and I fell in love with this.

(organ instrumental music) (organ instrumental music) (thunder rolling) (organ instrumental music) (powerful organ music) (powerful organ music) (Tom) In the aftermath of the 2020 Bighorn Fire here in the Catalina Mountains, researchers saw a unique opportunity to better understand how fire impacts the delicate sky island ecosystem.

So what can we learn about nature's resiliency in the face of such an event?

Watch this next story and find out.

[Music] - [Reporter] The Bighorn fire is still burning in the Catalina Mountains.

- [Reporter] 11,500 Acres have been burnt so far- - When I was sitting down here in Tucson, watching the evening news and watching the progression of the fire on the web it began to get closer and closer to places I know and love really well, such as the High-Elevation forest.

And I began thinking, Oh my gosh, I hope it's not gonna get in there.

Please, don't burn there, please, don't bring that forest down.

There's a really interesting dynamic being a person who loves the forest and a scientist who studies it.

One part of you wants to say, "I love this forest "I never want it to change."

And the other part of you looks at a forest that's changing and say, "Wow, that's interesting.

"I wonder why that happened that way."

And when a big fire happens, you're really kind of poised on the head of a pin about which of those is gonna be dominant because it's so interesting and yet can also be so devastating.

(metal scraping) (people chattering) After a wildfire, that's our time to get out and do research.

We try to prepare for that moment by having study plots out in the mountains before fires happen.

And so we have the unique opportunity to be able to return to those and look at how things have changed.

Not only in the short term, the first few months, but to track over many, many years how the forest recovers following a big fire.

- I'd say at the first look, driving up the road, doesn't look too bad until you get up to the Loma Linda area and can look down the North slopes of the mountain that burned very hot.

A little devastating to just come around the mountain and see just burnt sticks as far as you can see.

We're seeing bigger, larger fires, many places in the Southwest.

This could be a bellwether for what's gonna be happening in the next couple of decades in other areas.

- So we live in what's called the Sky Island bio-region.

The Sky Islands are a network of more than 60 mountain ranges from Northern Mexico up to the Colorado Plateau.

And people often refer to them as islands because they're islands of forest surrounded by lower desert or grassland.

What that means is that each Island could be a unique biological location, much like islands in the ocean.

This is part of what makes the Sky Islands such a unique resource.

- [Sonia] You can go from the low desert all the way to basically a Spruce forest that feels like you're in Canada in just a matter of an hour.

I just love being out there and just having a great view all the way down through the different ecosystems out to the desert.

(feet stomping) - I feel work often begins with a geographic positioning system, GPS because we're trying to get back to a particular location on the ground.

And so we'll navigate to that point.

And here under the live tree canopy and the edge.

- Yeah and the edge.

- This could definitely work.

- Looks pretty good.

(feet stomping) - What we do is study the plants and animals on the ground, the soil, It's a lot of hands and knees work, very detailed.

Trying to look at every plant, looking at whether trees are regenerating, whether there're seedlings, whether the overstory trees were damaged or not, whether they are gonna bounce back.

We use tapes to measure the diameter of trees.

We'll sometimes use increment cores to extract a core from the tree to look at their growth.

- Yeah, looks good.

So tree rings can tell you all kinds of things about a forest, the past climate.

You can match up the ring patterns to figure out exactly what ring goes with what year and using that you can match patterns back and back in time, basically for as long as you can find remnant woods still present on the mountains, (metal clanking) the changes that are happening now are happening very quickly compared to change in the past.

So now we're seeing major changes, burning entire mountain ranges, large, severe fires in a matter of years to decades.

So basically things are moving too fast for the forest to keep up in a lot of places.

2020, we're seeing fires all over the West and basically I think in the future, a dendrochronologist will definitely know that's the 2020 ring, you can tell there's a fire scar.

(Sonia chuckling) - The really big, important question in post-fire research right now are what are called post-fire trajectories.

That is what direction is this site gonna go?

Is it gonna go back to being a forest with the same species and similar processes from what it was, or is it gonna go off in a different direction?

There's no question that the contemporary fires we're seeing appear to be very different in kind from the historical fires.

And the big concern here is not that this was a big fire per se, but that it was a big fire with a lot of areas of very, very high severity effects.

And that we believe is the legacy of a century of keeping fire out of the forest.

So the fuels have accumulated and laid on top of that, the unmistakable signature of climate change.

(tool tapping) - So what tree are you working on over there?

- [Assistant] Tree 10.

- Tree 10, great.

- So an important question now in everybody's mind is, is that a permanent transition has that gone past a tipping point.

So it's now gonna be a different kind of ecosystem, not a forest or is it just a slow bending of the curve back to becoming forest?

And this is why we need this historical background to understand the Bighorn fire that happened in the Catalinas.

(feet stomping) I have to say that the research we do really increases my appreciation for the complexity and resilience of these forests.

We'll go up and study a plot and we'll find trees that have survived.

They somehow managed to make it through and they're green on top and they're growing.

And we'll often think, "How did this happen?"

Because this is supposed to be in the middle of a high severity patch and yet here's life.

The poet, Gary Snyder once said "Science walks in beauty."

And in a sense, we can't see wildfires as always a catastrophe or a tragedy or something terrible.

In fact, there's a big part of wildfire that is about renewal and it's about resilience and it's about adaptability.

And that's actually a really positive lesson because it means that many things that we're seeing that look like they've gotten stuck or damaged or lost irretrievably, perhaps aren't that way at all.

And maybe somebody will come along 50 or a hundred years from now and look at our notes and understand that this was just the process of recovery at it's very beginning.

These are just the first few steps and eventually the process of nature healing itself.

(soft music) (Tom) Next, we take you to Nogales, Arizona to meet rapper, poet, and community organizer Priscilla Nefftys who coined the term "Nogaleria," reflecting efforts to turn the bi-national community of Nogales into an outdoor urban art gallery.

These stories were produced outside of AZPM with editorial independence, and funding was provided by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Santa Cruz County American Rescue Plan Act.

Microphone check one two one two check check yeah yeah it's Nefftys [music] Hey I'm Priscilla Nefftys and I'm a local rapper artist and community organizer here in Nogales.

I've been doing hip-hop music since I was a teen.

I started recording my own songs when I was 16 and that's why I feel like that time is really important.

In the teenage years is when we start defining ourselves and that's why I've committed to support motivate our youth.

I was born here in Nogales, Arizona and I lived in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico across the line most took my life and I was always coming and going to school here and living there having family over there, friends here and that was just my my borderline.

[singing in Spanish] So when I was young I guess I didn't understand really what it was to live in the border because we're so close to our roots here from Mexico we mostly all speak Spanish we follow the traditions you know holidays and things like that so it was always so present to me and coming here to the US it was not that different you know because really Ambos Nogales is like one big city slit in half the train crosses pretty much every day so when stops or it slows down we're able to see the graffiti on the trains and that's also something that really makes Nogales hip-hop you know and it makes us inspired because we see art from other artists that are not in Nogales and also it's like a moving gallery.

When I started doing like my own history investigation the train was the first thing that came here that's really what brought the population to Nogales.

It was built in the 1880s and that's when like commerce started and mining around these lands so for me when I started doing the history investigation it took another turn of why it's so important here in Nogales.

2018 is when we started doing some of the graffiti murals around here that was a really big thing that we wanted to do and that's really where the term Nogaleria came from because we wanted to make Nogales an art gallery.

An outdoor urban gallery.

The main purpose of Nogaleria was to change the narrative like having something out there for Nogales people to feel proud of being from Nogales.

Charles Mingus, he was born in Nogales to a buffalo soldier father he became a legend in the whole world like everybody knows who Charles Mingus was and I feel like if when I was a child they would have told me about Charles Mingus it would have made me more inspired into the arts like I was still drawn to the art world but I feel like if it was more out there for kids they would also be inspired so that's why I was like okay Charles Mingus has to have a mural.

I really envision Morley like going back to that commerce area but in the arts like a lot of these spaces that are 100 year old buildings I feel that they can hold space for artists to like do workshops have their studios small galleries and really have a lot of locally made things here like art, hand crafts and all kinds you know textiles, paintings.

Think outside the box I think that's what Morley is about.

(Tom) Our Favorite Places series features Southern Arizona architects speaking thoughtfully and personally about a favorite building, place, or space in our region.

Today, Bill Draper, a member of the American Institute of Architects and the president and owner of JSRA Architects describes Grotto Hill.

(Calm music) - [Narrator] Grotto Hill is located just East of the Mission San Xavier del Bac, on the Tohono O'odham Nation.

(Calm music) The Hill is known for a white cross placed on its peak and a small religious shrine located halfway up the walking trail.

(Calm music) The North facing shrine, is a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes, to honor the Virgin Mary, located in France.

This irregularly shaped shallow cave Grotto, built in 1908, is a perfect place for prayers and reflection.

(Calm music) I experienced this serene place while attending my first year at the College of Architecture.

Moving to Tucson was my first time leaving Canyon de Chelly in Northern Arizona.

And visiting the nearby Tohono O'odham community, gave me comfort being around fellow native people and enjoying the delicious red chili food with fried bread.

Mmmh-mmh.

(calm music) There existed 360 degree wide panoramic view of the forest surrounding mountains.

The Santa Catalina, the Rincon, the Santa Rita and the Tucson mountains.

(calm music) The mountain can also be seen directly North of this wonderful site.

Which gave me the sense of scale of my location in relation to the U of A Campus.

The surrounding natural desert and fertile farmlands, along with the nearby winding Santa Cruz river, that once flowed year around, gave me an understanding of the meaning, a sense of place and what Kevin A. Lynch's term, imageability meant.

I began relating and understanding the new terminology being used in design.

(calm music) The aesthetics and proportions of the adjacent White Dove of the Desert and the grasping of Louis Sulliv form follows function, shade and shadow, solids and voids, texture, context, all became clear to me.

(car engine revving) The sequential approach by vehicle, then the strolling procession of Grotto Hill, reminded me of the Greeks, starting from the Agora and progressing up to the Acropolis during the festival of the Panathenaea.

My journey around the spiral path allowed me to experience differing three-dimensional views of the mission.

And as I arrive at my destination at the node, I contemplated about my future as an architect.

I regularly visit this place to reminisce my early days and to enjoy the open vistas and sunsets that slowly set over this peaceful community.

Was all this knowledge always in me, and I just became aware of this knowledge while studying architecture?

(calm music) (Tom) Like what you're seeing on Arizona Illustrated?

Then connect with us on social media for even more Arizona Illustrated.

Like, follow and subscribe to Arizona Illustrated on Facebook, Instagram and X.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week for another episode.