Found a few weeks ago, always wondered when these came up in my area.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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Cool! I just read their wiki page and it says
Snowbank fungus is a new term for me. Not sure yet what makes a fungus thrive through snow. Maybe they have anti-freeze proteins?
Does your area get a lot of snow?
We typically get a lot of snow, sometimes 9ft in a single winter or more but the last few years have been pitiful. This was at a slightly higher elevation (I am at about 500 metres). I often see people in washington and oregon find this mushroom throughout the winter, I thought it would be later for my area but not the beginning of June.
9ft of snow?! I only experienced such deep snow in an urban setting while living in Connecticut for a year. I spent a few years in Oregon but the snow in the area never got so deep while I was there. When I was in the US I was not yet able to identify many fungi as I was mainly obsessed with animals (especially salamanders) back then, so unfortunately I did not really appreciate the diversity of fungi there. Although once in Oregon I did attempt to dye some socks using a wolf lichen (Letharia vulpina) and a pressure cooker. That did not end well.
9ft would usually be accumulative over the course of a winter, it snows for 5 or 6 months in northern BC, but we did get 6ft in 2 days once and that was a shit show. I would give the Letharia dye another try, the last time I did it I don't think I used a mordant but you could use alum or something. I would skip the pressure cooker and just do a hot water bath, then you don't felt your wool socks down into little baby boots.
Would love to... When I was in Oregon this lichen was super abundant. At the moment I am living in Amsterdam (Netherlands), and I see mostly Xanthoria, Evernia, Rhizocarpon, and a few other lichen species that grow on city trees, but they are very small and spotty, nothing compared to the wolf lichen in Oregon. I do miss the Oregon forests with the old growth sequoia redwood trees and all that lichen.
They don't grow in snow while temperatures are still freezing or anything, they grow using the moisture from melting snow once the weather starts to warm up. They just pop up so quickly that you'll often find them poking out of snowbanks which haven't fully melted.
I see. So it is not necessarily that their mycelium are better at surviving the freezing temperatures, but rather that either they fruit quicker once conditions are acceptable or that their fruiting bodies are more cold tolerant. Thanks, it's interesting.