The text came on a Tuesday in the last week of August. Two words: Getting close.
No greeting. No location. No explanation. It was from a guy I’ve talked to maybe eight times in my life, mostly in a hardware store parking lot, and I knew exactly what he meant and I knew better than to ask where.
That’s the part nobody warns you about when you move to Wyoming and start picking wild fruit. The berries are the easy part. The culture around the berries is what takes years.
My People Bought Jam
I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it, because it’s the honest starting point for everything I write about preserving out here: I did not grow up doing this. I grew up in St. Louis. My people bought jam. It came from a store, in a jar, with a label, and nobody in my family had ever stood in a ditch in ninety-degree heat arguing with a wasp about a cluster of fruit the size of BBs.
So when Kimi and I landed in Casper in 2022 and I started poking around at Wyoming food traditions, I assumed foraging would work the way most hobbies work. You read up, you learn the plants, you go find the plants. And the plant part is learnable — I’ve written up the identification basics in the wild plum jam post, and both chokecherries and wild plums are Prunus cousins that come ripe in the same late-summer window, which makes them a natural pair to chase in one season.
What I didn’t understand is that the plants are maybe forty percent of it. The rest is social.
The Knowledge Doesn’t Live in Books
A few weeks back I wrote about why Wyoming cans everything, and a lot of that story is institutional — Extension agents, 4-H, government bulletins, county fair judges with clipboards. There was a whole apparatus built to teach people how to put food up safely, and it worked.
Foraging has no apparatus. There’s no bulletin that says go two miles past the second cattle guard and look on the north side of the draw. That knowledge lives entirely in people’s heads and it moves the way folk knowledge has always moved: a grandmother taking a kid along because there’s nobody to watch him, a neighbor mentioning something over a fence, a hunting buddy who owes you one.
This isn’t a Wyoming quirk. Folklorists have documented the same pattern all over rural America — morel hunters in Appalachia, huckleberry pickers in Idaho, anyone who’s ever gotten cagey about a mushroom patch. Gathering traditions tend to be oral, local, and closely held. What’s striking here is how alive it still is. This isn’t a nostalgia thing people talk about. It’s a thing they’re doing, right now, in September, with a bucket.
And it goes back a lot further than my version of it. Long before homesteaders showed up, chokecherries were a staple across the northern plains, and they remain a traditional and ceremonial food for the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone on the Wind River Reservation — pounded into patties, used in ceremony, harvested in that same late-summer window. That’s a different and much older tradition than the one I’m awkwardly learning, and I’d rather point at it respectfully than pretend it’s the same thing. But it’s worth knowing that when you’re standing in a chokecherry thicket in Wyoming in August, you are extremely late to a very old party.
The Rules Nobody Writes Down
Here’s what I’ve pieced together in four seasons of asking dumb questions:
You don’t ask where. Ever. You can ask when. You can ask how’s it looking this year. You can ask what the fruit set is like after a dry June. You cannot ask where, and if someone tells you where unprompted, that is a significant social event and you should act like it.
You don’t strip a bush. The published foraging ethics say some version of the same thing — the “rule of thirds” is the common one: take about a third, leave a third for the wildlife that actually depends on it, leave a third for the plant. Some guides go further and say take no more than a small fraction in any one spot. Out here I’ve mostly heard it phrased less formally: don’t be a hog. Bears, birds, and deer eat this fruit. So does the guy who’s been picking that draw since 1987.
Private land means ask. Not “it looked abandoned.” Not “there was no fence.” Wyoming takes property lines seriously, and a ditch full of chokecherries next to a county road may or may not be yours to pick. The right move is to find the landowner and ask, and in my limited experience people say yes far more often than you’d expect — a surprising number of folks are delighted somebody wants the fruit. On public land the rules genuinely vary: BLM ground generally allows small personal-use gathering, while national forests can require a free-use or personal-use permit depending on the district. Call the local office. It takes four minutes.
You reciprocate in jelly, not information. If somebody points you at fruit, you show up in October with a jar. You do not repay them by telling three other people about the spot.
Two Spots, One Season
I have exactly two data points of my own, both from this year, and neither was inherited.
The chokecherries came from persistence and a lot of driving, and turned into the chokecherry jelly I’m still slightly smug about. The wild plums came from pure luck — a thicket I spotted off a county road while going somewhere else entirely, which I have deliberately not described precisely in anything I’ve published, because I’ve learned how that works out here.
Four years ago I would have found that secrecy a little precious. Now I get it. A good chokecherry draw isn’t a renewable convenience; it’s a specific bend in a specific creek that produces in some years and sulks in others, and if fifteen people show up with five-gallon buckets it produces for nobody. The secrecy isn’t stinginess. It’s the only enforcement mechanism a completely unwritten system has.
The Part I’m Actually Here For
My son is five. He came out to the plums with me this year, contributed approximately nine plums to the effort, ate a suspicious number, and spent most of the afternoon investigating a dead grasshopper. He will not remember the jam.
But this is exactly how the transfer works. Nobody sits a kid down and teaches foraging. You just bring him, over and over, until one August in his twenties he drives past a certain bend in the road and something in his brain says getting close.
I didn’t inherit a spot. I’m going to have to build one, badly, over about thirty years, and hand it to somebody who’ll think it was always there. (All I’ve added to the operation is a decent picking basket, because ice cream buckets tip over and I am tired of learning that lesson.)
That’s the tradition. Not the jelly. The jelly is just the receipt.
If you’ve got a spot, I’m obviously not asking where. But I’d love to hear how you learned it, and who taught you. Tag @wyofood when the buckets come out.
— Sean