blue ridge shroomer

Hi,another newbie here. We have alot of ashe here in the mountains of wnc. Are they edible? Is now the prime time of the year for them?

Hi Feral Boy,thanks for the quick response. here are a few more pictures that may help. sorry about the quality, they are taken on my phone.It is yellowish white underneath and stains light reddish brown.

Hello everybody.I was out in the woods today and found a few mushrooms and i dont have a clue what they are.Here are some pics. any help would be great . thanks

To begin with, I would like tosay hello to everyone and thank who is responsible for starting and maintaining this site, i am excited that i stumbled on it and look forward to meeting everyone in the future. I am an amature to collecting and I am tying to learn as i go, so this site is like a classroom for me.My knowledge of mushrooms is , for the most part, limited to morels and chanterelles. They are the only types I have collected and feel comfortable identifying. I have found morels for about 25 years now and have my choice spots that i go to every year. I have worked in Cherokee, N.C. since 2004 and through the years i have become very good friends with alot of Cherokee people who have spent their lives living there on the reservation. Over the years I have been told about a mushroom that is a delicasy to them and they call them wishees. i am not sure if the spelling is correct and i have spelled it like they pronounce it. It is a Cherokee word that has been used by them to refer to them and is literally thousands of years old. I only recently was told by a good Cherokee friend that they are better known as hen of the Woods. So here i am trying to learn all I can about them, however, one thing I have noticed in my research of them is nowhere so far have i read about them being refered to as Wishees. I began checking them out about two weeks ago so i am extremely limited on my knowledge of them. Thus i have several questions that i hope someone can help me with about Wishees. I have actually only been in the woods looking for them four times, and that has been in the last week. Needless to say I have so far been unsuccessfull in my quest and ended up diging ginseng while looking for these elusive guys. I am hunting for them in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina and i know they are here but i am frustrated with my attempts to date. My friend is supposed to take me this week and hopefully this will broaden my horizons since he knows of some places his grandfather used to take him as a boy. He did mention that maybe the weather here hasnt gotten cold enough yet for Wishees to be out , but told me of another Cherokee favorite that should be up now and he called them slicks. He did not know the real name of these ones, is there any one familiar with these? Well i suppose i have rambled enough for now. I will post again soon, hopefully with some pictures of slicks and wishees. Happy hunting ya'all!