Alice, age 66, keeps the location of her Chantarelle hunting ground top secret, and only Team Alice knows where it is.

I've been mushrooming for about 35 years. I've always been interested in nature and have always hiked a lot. So, I'd be on long hikes and I started noticing the mushrooms, and I guess I just got interested. I started by getting a couple of books and trying to identify which ones were the most poisonous—that's an important place to start! And then I found out the ones that are easy to tell are edible and since I also enjoy cooking, it was a natural thing to move into that. So, I've been doing it for a long time and when I came to New York, I read about the New York Mycological Society here and went on some walks and I found it's wonderful fun to go out with the group, so I joined.

It combines all the things I like to do: you're out in nature and you're hiking but you're not hiking real hard. You're just having a nice comfortable walk and you stop and pick mushrooms and then you hike some more. It's just a nice, social group. The members do all different things and come from different places, and we get together and cook dinners and just have a nice time.

I've never eaten any poisonous mushrooms. The club has only ever had one poisoning, and that was some years ago. And that guy is still around—he made it through! But he did get pretty sick from it.

I think when you find things in quantity or in huge amounts or huge size, it's pretty exciting. Every year we have a Chanterelle weekend in Vermont where a group of us rent a hotel there and we stay for a three-day weekend. It's such fun, picking mushrooms and then cooking and eating and barbecueing there. It's really a neat place. For the past couple of years I've gone there with my friends and on the way we picked mushrooms to take to the mushroom weekend at my own little secret Chantarelle spot where we could pick 100 pounds if we didn't just get tired of picking. We went with this huge basket this year for everyone on our way to the weekend, so they started calling us Team Alice.