Business Notes Windfalls

Sometimes natural disaster has a sunny side. Last summer raging fires consumed 98,000 acres of spruce around Tok in the Alaskan interior. But this year villagers are harvesting a bumper crop of morels, wild mushrooms springing up with abandon on the charred forest floor. The delicacy, which sells in specialty shops for $14 a pound fresh and as much as $200 a pound dried, is in great demand in tony restaurants. When Tok folk learned they could make as much as $20 an hour gathering morels for wholesale buyers from Seattle and Vancouver, "they went crazy," says Aaron Schutt, 18, a waiter and part-time mushroomer. Morel hunters in the Land of the Midnight Sun have an edge. "It doesn't get dark, so people are picking all night," notes Victor Marteddu of Vancouver, who bought up 1,800 lbs. of morels in just three days.