Ryan Gregg crawls on his belly on the wet, cold ground beneath tree branches one recent evening on a friend’s rural property. Twigs and grass stick in his shaggy hair and mud has caked his boots. He’s eye level with it now: spring’s annual fungal gold.

Their season spanning barely a month here, morel mushrooms annually have many enraptured by the hunt. Prized for their nutty, meaty flavor, the conically shaped ridgy mushrooms inspire ventures into the woods and along riverbanks for weeks between late March and mid May.

Few accept the challenge with as much aplomb as Gregg, 40, who collected 1,792 pounds of mushrooms last year as he pulled a refrigerated trailer up and down the center of the country.

“It’s like an Easter Egg hunt,” Gregg said.

‘Moving where the mushrooms were’

Gregg began hunting at about 10 while growing up near 80 acres of woods here, one of the country’s hotbeds for mushrooms.

In 2010, he began hauling a refrigerated trailer up and down eight states, beginning near Texas and Oklahoma at the first signs of spring. Gregg worked his way north, camping or crashing with fellow hunters he met through a website he started in 2010 called morelhunters.com.

A decal for the site is slapped on the back of the silver Chrysler van Gregg drives. Inside, he lays a cot and a cooler to preserve the contents of each trip’s haul.

Gregg lives in East Lawrence with his wife Stacy Wall and four children between 4 and 15. Before he took a new desk job earlier this year, he had his best year yet, selling morels to wholesalers who sent them to restaurants in Chicago, New York and Las Vegas and earning Gregg enough to take nearly three months of unpaid vacation. Gregg said he spent those months “just living in a tent, moving where the mushrooms were.”

Last year was a great year for mushrooms in Kansas, he said. This season started slow, but morels will still be found until temperatures climb to the mid-80s. He must take a “weekend warrior” approach this year, with family trips planned for Nebraska and Montana so far.

Mushrooms aren’t the only discoveries on such trips. Gregg said he found as many crack pipes as mushrooms one year in a stretch of woods in Oklahoma. And once, as Gregg hunted in “in the middle of nowhere” in Kansas he found six abandoned puppies, one of which he kept as his own: Victor, an Australian kelpie.

‘In the woods’?

Morelhunters.com is a network now north of 4,000 users — some living as far away as Greece. Gregg jokes that the number of morel hunters has exploded in recent years because of “stupid websites on the Internet.”

Most serious hunters have spots, guarded with secrecy, where they focus their efforts. Even Gregg’s website’s sightings maps carry a disclaimer that they are only approximate locations.

“The woods,” is about as much as Gregg will reveal about his favorite spot. “The woods near water.”

“Everyone knows about the river,” he said, referring to the trails along the Kaw. “You need to know your trees. Most people just walk around looking at the ground all over the place. Everyone I know that does it for a living is looking at the horizon, looking for certain trees and conditions.”

Along the river, Gregg said, large patches of cottonwoods usually portend success. He also seeks out maps of tornado paths and controlled burns. In upland areas, Gregg looks for dead and dying elm trees or clusters of fallen bark. “If you find that,” he said, “you’ll spend an hour on your knees picking instead of walking around.”

As recently as five years ago, Gregg said, a fraction of today’s mushroom hunters scoured trails near Clinton Lake or the Kansas River. Part of the reason he began traveling, Gregg said, is because the mushroom hunting scene had grown so much.

‘Mushroom weather’

When Gregg visited his friend Steve King’s property the other night, the sky was overcast and a faint drizzle cut the cool air. “Mushroom weather,” Gregg said as he balanced a hand-rolled cigarette between his fingers.

After snapping on a yellow Camelback backpack, Gregg and King walked a trail leading to a pond. For nearly a mile, ash and elm trees stood tall — beacons of morel patches.

As they walked, Gregg’s eyes scanned both sides of the trail and he stopped mid-conversation when a thicket of morels came into view. He belly-crawled across rocks, dirt and leaves, coming eye level with the mushrooms as he pulled out a large knife and neatly sliced each mushroom’s stem. It’s a habit he found useful in selling the mushrooms: no customer wants a dirty or crushed stem. And “grippin’ and rippin'” the mushroom from the ground can disturb its mycelium, the layer of fungus in soil from which the bodies sprout.

Here, Gregg collects two handfuls destined for a mesh bag — piling morels in plastic bags can damage the mushrooms’ delicate ridges and cause them to decompose. Moments later, he can’t see any more protruding from the soil.

“If you can’t see them,” Gregg said, “they’re not ready to be picked yet.”