2016 Mtns & Mesas with covers

Mountains & Mesas page 27
fudge and cookies. Other people relish the opportunity
to make batches of pesto.
Gold is delicious and nutritious
Another lifelong Walsenburg resident, Kathy
Zgut, also grew up harvesting native plants. She recalls
being a child and accompanying her parents as
they collected piñon and another plant called cota.
Cota, which goes by a number of different names (Indian
tea, Navajo tea, Colorado Greenthread), is a
rather inconspicuous plant until it blooms with nodding
yellow flowers. If the conditions are right—
meaning lots of moisture—whole fields of cota can
turn a brilliant gold. Zgut’s father taught her to just
collect the tops of these perennials to help ensure
healthy future crops.
Tea made from cota is considered very tasty, and
Zgut’s family (the Pinedas) drank it year round in
place of other more conventional teas. More than
simply tasting good, cota is a plant with many medicinal
attributes. Mildly antiseptic, cota is used as
a remedy for indigestion, as a diuretic, and to treat
fevers. To this day, Zgut uses cota, harvesting flowers
she grows in her yard.
We’ve got some amazing mushrooms
Not everyone who takes part in harvesting
plants in Huerfano County is a native Coloradan.
One such person is Maridith Dressler, who moved to
the region in 1975 from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Maridith is an avid gardener who grows and preserves
vegetables, fruits, and herbs. What she can’t
grow—primarily mushrooms—she takes to the
mountains to harvest.
Among her favorite mushrooms is the bolete.
Commonly found in spruce forests, boletes grow all
over the world. These reddish-brown beauties grow
best in moist soils where sphagnum mosses are present.
Sometimes referred to as hamburger bun mushrooms
(due to their resemblance to the food), this
plant is different from most other mushrooms as it
has pores rather than gills on the underside of its cap.
This makes it easy to identify a bolete, but anyone
gathering mushrooms needs to know what they are
looking for, as there are many species of mushrooms
that are toxic and sometimes deadly. Once harvested,
boletes won’t last long, so what Dressler can’t
use right away she dries on a screen or in a dehydrator
for future use.
Hidden mountain miracle
In the mountains of Huerfano County grows a
medicinal plant called osha. Fewer people harvest
osha than the aforementioned plants—which turns
out to be a good thing. La Veta resident, Rena
Kaplowitz, who has been studying medicinal herbs
for many decades, warns of over-harvesting. She
talks about ginseng collecting in West Virginia as a
cautionary tale. So many people had harvested ginseng
there the plant become highly endangered.
Kaplowitz would hate to see Colorado’s osha suffer
the same fate.