Only ten years have passed

On 20 September 2013, the three of us went to Munții Bihorului, the popular winter-summer resort of Stâna de Vale. At that time it was the ending mushroom season at a thousand metres, and three of us went mushrooming on the hiking trail. The weather was variable cloudy and surprisingly cool. At the beginning of the hike there was even a drizzle of fine rain. I was right to dress in layers, because I would have been cold. There was no one except the three of us, and the depth of the silence was astonishing. At the same time, the peacefulness of the old spruceforest was magical. (I won't mention that there might have been a bear in the vicinity.) We soon found the first cepes Boletus edulis. We had a great experience. Although there were a lot of soggy fruiting bodies, there were plenty of hard ones too. Like the perfect in the picture. It was a beautiful mushroom hunt, a tribute to abundance. That's why it's so thought-provoking to see how quickly everything is changing because of climate change. Munții Apuseni also receives insufficient rainfall, and temperatures are rising there. The combination of drought and unusual heat is fatal for spruce. Those old forests are dying.
On 17 September 2017, a supercell chain of thunderstorms lashed Stâna de Vale. I was last there in 2021 and traces of the storm four years earlier were everywhere. There was hardly any mushrooms in the former mushroom forest! You could translate the linked article with Google Translate integrated in the blog. But the pictures are very illustrative. We are surrounded by rapid transformation, and we are not reacting to it. It is depressing and makes you wonder what will happen here in 2033!
To conclude this article, here are some pictures from the mushroom trip ten years ago.