Picking Huckleberries

Back when I first came to Montana, one of the things that struck me was the amount of attention given to huckleberries.

I had never heard of them before and, yet, the berry was somewhat of a celebrity in these parts. Huckleberries seemed to flavor everything imaginable, from taffy to ice cream, jelly to fudge and butter to popcorn. Despite my curiosity, I actually never tried anything flavored with the berries until about four months ago when I finally had some huckleberry flavored ice cream.

Delicious.

Of course, with the variety of huckleberry-flavored products on the shelves, anyone can enjoy the taste of the berry, but I wanted to go out and actually pick my own, fresh from the plant. A couple weekends ago, I got my chance.

Roseanne, a lady from my church, invited me to join her in picking huckleberries and so we headed up to the mountain at Lookout Pass. As we climbed and climbed on foot up the road that traversed the mountain, we passed several huckleberry plants that had no huckleberries on them. Figures, I thought, becoming discouraged.

To my dismay, we climbed a little higher until we were more than halfway up the mountain. Roseanne spotted a berry nearby on the plant. As she pointed it out to me, I was a bit surprised. Huckleberries were smaller than I had imagined. Back in Iowa, we had mulberries and raspberries and I guess I had envisioned huckleberries to be about the same size or larger. Yet, this berry we had found was rather small. Nevertheless, we set out on separate paths.

As I started out, I had a hard time finding plants with even one huckleberry on them. I combed through the trees and forage, searching the plants and coming up empty in my search. Becoming bored, I decided to check my phone to see if I had any service and I ended up dropping it. Kneeling down, I picked it up and looking out I saw that there were a couple berries on the plants ahead of me. I walked over, picked them off and put them in my bag. I realized quickly that it was easier to get the berries from underneath as they were hidden under leaves most of them time when looking at them from the top. Still, I wasn’t finding many, but enough so that I moved from plant to plant, as if someone had left me a trail of huckleberries. I began to draw the conclusion that huckleberries are  elusive.

But as my eyes were becoming accustomed to spotting the huckleberries, it wasn’t too long before they became easier to find. And as I moved through the trees, I eventually found a patch of plants that had more berries to offer. I felt like I had found a treasure, the mother load of huckleberries. Leaving the first patch of plants, I headed up hill and stumbled upon another where it seemed like there were just too many to behold. I would spot one plant and quickly spot two more that had ripe huckleberries for the picking. Some were small, but I also stumbled across a few larger ones. The entire venture felt like an Easter egg hunt.

Remembering an article I had read about picking huckleberries, I recalled a sentence that I had read: “Don’t get between a bear and his berries.” I figured that if a bear did show up, perhaps I could just offer him my quantity of huckleberries while I got away.

Well, there weren’t any bear and apparently there weren’t that many huckleberries. My tiny Ziplock bag was barely a fourth of the way full when Roseanne and I decided to head home for the day after spending an hour and a half on the mountainside. She told me that this was one of the worst huckleberry seasons she’d ever seen. I was quite pleased with what I’d found. As we moved back down the mountain, we were checking plants as we came across them and it was hard to pull ourselves away as we kept eyeing berries.

We eventually returned home and ate a scoop of vanilla ice cream with huckleberries on top. The next couple of mornings I used the remainder of my huckleberries on my cereal and when they were gone, I was presented with the fact that perhaps my quantity had been very small as Roseanne had informed me that typically you’d return home with a couple bags full.

Nonetheless, they were pretty tasty and it had been a day well spent.