Whole Fresh Chaga buying (3 pounds, 1 oz) "Winter Bear #2"

Whole, fresh chaga, harvested this October in Interior Alaska.

Weight: 3 pounds, 1 ounce, "Winter Bear #2"

This chaga can be used for display, or cut up and dried for tea. It has been trimmed and cleaned. If you choose to use it for tea it will need to be cut before it dries. Otherwise it will dry wood-hard over the course of a month or two. Customers often compliment the quality and potency of my chaga and this is the best chaga I have to offer. It is many years old, and I was able to pry it off the host tree in one beautiful piece. The photos in this listing are of the chaga specimen you will get. It has been stored frozen since harvesting and will still be alive when you receive it.

Inquire about international orders: The price will be $16/pound + shipping.

The high quality of my chaga is largely due to the cold climate, but another major reason is the forest type I prefer to harvest in. The best chaga is decades old, growing on ancient birch trees. The best place to find these are in old growth white spruce forests. This is due to ecological succession. New habitat, created by the movement of a river's channel, or from buying fire, is colonized by willow and alder first. Then the birch take over. The beautiful white-trunk birch forests you see in photos or paintings is this stage of succession. These are mature but young trees, 30-50 years old. After about 200 years the spruce have shaded-out and replaced the birch. However, scattered among the huge spruce you find small groves of very old, large birch trees that have survived the spruce take-over of the area. This is where you find large, old chaga that has had plenty of time to soak up and concentrate the nutrients of the ancient gnarled host tree. Wandering the backcountry looking for these beautiful old groves of birch is a bit of a sport.