Hunting pine nuts was a common fall tradition (like cutting your own Christmas tree) when we lived in Nevada. My family did it, my friends’ families did it, Grandpa’s family did it, and we took our girls out to do it.
Some background: Pine nuts grow in the cones of pinyon trees in the high arid mountains of the western United States. Before the 20th century they were a major food source for many Native American tribes. The cones can be picked green and boiled until they open up and give up their nuts, but they are covered with sticky pitch that doesn’t wash off hands or clothes. Picking them green makes a terrible mess. The most common way to harvest them is to wait until they are "ripe" enough to dry out and turn brown on the tree. Then each section of the cone spreads and the nuts drop out onto the ground. Some years, depending on the spring moisture and weather, the trees don’t produce many pine nuts at all, other years they provide a bumper crop.
Technically, you don’t "hunt" pine nuts. You hunt for the mountain that has the best producing trees, then go back to the same place year after year. My dad and brother, Alan, had several favorite places in the hills around McGill. Every year when they went deer hunting they took their pine nut paraphernalia with them and gathered pine nuts on the way home. They covered the ground under each pine tree with large tarps and used rakes and sticks to shake the trees until all the nuts fell out. Then they gathered up the tarps and bagged the nuts in gunnysacks. At home we separated any cones that had fallen with the nuts and rinsed the nuts in a big tub in the back yard. When they were clean and completely dry again Dad sacked them up for storage.
It was Mom’s turn next. Pine nuts can be eaten raw, but they don’t taste very good (rather piney). Mom sprinkled them with salt and roasted them on cooky sheets in the oven. We would have eaten them like candy, but you have to take time to crack each nut in half with your teeth to get the edible nut part out of the shell. Still, we would sit for a long time, eating one nut at a time and piling the shells up in a dish.
Teachers at school could always tell when pine nut season hit. The kids brought pine nuts to school in their pockets and dropped the shells wherever they happened to be when they ate them. The school custodian had to sweep up the empty shells that got crunched underfoot and scattered in the classrooms and hallways.
My dad always looked for big, old trees that produced larger than usual pine nuts. In 1972, the year before he died, when he and Alan went out for the last time, they found several huge, very old trees and brought back pine nuts that were three times the normal size. They saved them in the freezer. Thirty-six years later, I still have a small bag of those nuts in my freezer. We will never eat them. They are a special reminder of a special father.
