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As kids, my brother and I would camp out in the woods behind our house in western Washington and “live off the land” for a day or two at a time. This involved foraging wild salmonberries and huckleberries from the forest…supplemented liberally with green beans picked from the back garden. In later variations we somehow decided a bag of snacks was also permissible, which doesn’t quite seem to capture the intent.
These days, I still love snacking on wild berries while out hiking, including the salmonberries and huckleberries of my childhood, but also several other berry species. In today’s post, I’ll share my seven favorite edible berries of the Pacific Northwest, including photos and how to identify them, so you can enjoy wild edible berries on your hikes, too.
I commonly find these berries while hiking between the Cascades and the coast in Oregon, Washington, and northern California. Many of these berries are also found in British Columbia and southern Alaska, and some have ranges that extend further east.
The seven berries I’ll cover:
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Salmonberry
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Red Huckleberry
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Mountain Huckleberry
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Evergreen Huckleberry
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Thimbleberry
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Himalayan Blackberry
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Trailing Blackberry
Per Native Plants PNW, huckleberries are in the same genus as blueberries and cranberries, Vaccinium. The other berries I’ll cover are in the rose family.
If you prefer to start with a video introduction to these berries, check out our video below.
Our video overview of edible berries in the Pacific Northwest
#1. Salmonberry
Since they remind me so much of home, salmonberries are one of my favorite wild edible berries. Although they’re quite common in Pacific Northwest forests, salmonberries are rarely mentioned in popular culture, and they’re rarely sold commercially.
Salmonberries have the showiest flowers of the seven Pacific Northwest edible berries I’ll cover here, and they’re also first to fruit each year. After an April/May bloom season, the bright magenta flowers ripen to a mix of orange and red berries between May and July, with the timing depending on where you are in the region. Orange salmonberries don’t deepen to red over time—the berries just vary in color when fully ripe!
Salmonberries are very juicy and quite large, like an inflated raspberry. The salmonberry flavor is mild, but a little bitter. Bryan says the bitter flavor is too strong. Let us know in the comments what you think!
They grow in thickets that provide good cover for wildlife. According to the US Forest Service, salmonberries grow from California all the way up to Alaska, and also occur across the ocean in Japan! The leaves grow in sets of three, and if you fold the middle leaf backward, the two leaves remaining resemble an upside-down butterfly.
The origin of the name “salmonberry” may trace back to the Native American tradition of eating salmonberries with salmon and salmon eggs.
#2. Red Huckleberry
The red huckleberry is another childhood favorite, though you’d need to pick a ton of them to live off the land, as they’re very small! The red huckleberry grows all over the low elevation forests west of the Cascades. If you live near the I-5 corridor in Washington or Oregon, this is probably the huckleberry you’ll find.
The berries are small, spherical, and red, and they’re quite tart. I think they’re delicious, but they can be a bit of a surprise if you’re not ready for the tart flavor.
The red huckleberry plant has small leaves and grows as a distinct shrub rather than a thicket. You’ll often find these huckleberry plants in the same places you’d find hemlock seedlings—growing right out of decomposing stumps and logs in the forest. Per Native Plants PNW, red huckleberry plants flower between April and June and fruit July-August. Their range extends from southern Alaska to central California, west of the Cascade mountains.
If you’re wondering how that huckleberry milkshake at a roadside stand can be purple, since huckleberries themselves are bright red, stay tuned. The red huckleberry is another Pacific Northwest wild berry that’s not sold commercially. The huckleberry that typically finds its way into milkshakes, syrups, and jams is the mountain huckleberry instead. I’ll cover that one next.
#3. Mountain Huckleberry
Mountain huckleberries look a lot like blueberries. They’re blue in color, and the berries are larger than red huckleberries. They’re also quite a bit sweeter, so they’re more popular commercially (e.g. in huckleberry jams like this one, milkshakes, syrups, etc). Mountain huckleberry is even the state fruit of Idaho!
Mountain huckleberries are common in the Cascades, since they thrive in higher-elevation environments. They fruit through late August, right at the peak of the summer mountain-hiking season here in the Pacific Northwest. But stay alert if you eat these while hiking, because (per Native Plants PNW) the mountain huckleberry is also a favorite snack for bears.
These huckleberries have a fascinating connection with fire. They can regrow from their roots, so they recover well from wildfires (often better than competing plants). Without fire, other plant species tend to outcompete them instead.
Mountain huckleberries have a patchwork range from the western US states and Canadian provinces through to the midwest. In the western states, they’re most common in the Cascades.
#4. Evergreen Huckleberry
The last common wild huckleberry in the Pacific Northwest is the evergreen huckleberry. They grow west of the Cascades, between California and British Columbia, according to Native Plants PNW. The highest prevalence of evergreen huckleberry I’ve seen is along the coast, especially in southern Oregon and northern California.
Evergreen huckleberry plants keep their leaves in winter, and the leaves are much thicker and a darker shade of green than the red huckleberry or mountain huckleberry. The berries are a deep purple color.
They flower in April/May, and the berries ripen between August and September. Despite this relatively short window, the evergreen huckleberry season seems long because the berries keep well on the plant for a few months after they first ripen. In the photo below (from October), there were still a lot of huckleberries, and they were still delicious!
#5. Thimbleberry
Circling back to berries in the rose family, thimbleberries are another classic Pacific Northwest native berry. They’re red and resemble a very flattened, fuzzy thimble. The berries are curiously dry rather than juicy, but the flavor is tart and delicious.
While they’re in the rose family like many other berries, thimbleberry plants don’t have thorns. You can identify the plants based on their enormous leaves. Small white flowers open in April and May. The thimbleberry range is broader than most berries on our list—per the US Forest Service, they are found in a patchwork all the way from the west coast to the midwest!
Even so, like the salmonberry and red huckleberry, I’ve never seen thimbleberry products in stores. It’s one you’ll have to experience in the wild!
#6. Himalayan Blackberry
Blackberries are contentious in the Pacific Northwest. Like dandelions, they seem to spontaneously generate without an obvious source. Blackberry leaves poke through the fence around the edges of our garden in Portland. I once left one alone, imagining I might train it up a trellis. When I returned from a trip, I found it had overtaken the whole back section of the garden in a wall of thorns.
Growing up, I remember helping my parents pull blackberry brambles on weekends. I’d tug and tug, and then tumble right over when the thick roots inevitably snapped in my hands, leaving underground tendrils to resprout a few weeks later.
You’ll see huge masses of blackberry brambles along bike paths and highways, abandoned lots, and all the in-between spaces. If anything is an invasive species, it’s this one: the Himalayan blackberry.
But toward the end of summer, the blackberry harvest can be extreme, too. That’s when it’s time to set aside frustrations with this highly aggressive plant and go berry-picking!
This year the blackberries were in full swing in the Portland area in early August. Bryan and I picked blackberries along the bike path for about an hour and gathered 8 pounds of berries! A lot of them went straight in the Vitamix blender for smoothies, Bryan made a tasty cobbler, and we froze a couple large bags of berries for later. Blackberry-picking is definitely a treasured summer tradition.
One reason this insidious plant spreads so well is that it generates about 13,000 seeds per square meter, per Oregon State University. The seeds can survive for years.
NPR ran a great piece on the story of this simultaneously admired and despised plant. In a nutshell, plant breeder Luther Burbank got Himalayan blackberry seeds from a collector in India in the late 1800s and began breeding the blackberries on the west coast. Unfortunately, his experiment was overly successful…the plant can’t be stopped.
Luther Burbank called this blackberry variety the Himalaya Giant, which is why it’s commonly known today as the Himalayan blackberry. However, since it’s actually from Armenia, you’ll see some sources refer to it now as the Armenian blackberry.
The Himalayan blackberry isn’t the only blackberry in the Pacific Northwest, but it’s the most noticeable. Look for huge bramble thickets. Himalayan blackberry brambles have large thorns and white flowers with rounded petals.
#7. Trailing Blackberry
We also have a native blackberry in the Pacific Northwest, which is known as the trailing blackberry or Pacific blackberry. Its distinctive growth pattern of trailing along the ground sets it apart from the Himalayan blackberry, which grows more like an impenetrable wall. The brambles are thin and vine-like, much more flexible than the thick stalks of Himalayan blackberry plants. Like the Himalayan blackberry, the flowers are white, but the petals are narrower and pointier.
The trailing blackberry is native from northern California to British Columbia, per Oregon State University.
Other Adventures in the Pacific Northwest
Enjoy the edible berries of the Pacific Northwest next time you’re out hiking! For adventure ideas in the Pacific Northwest, check out our PNW Trip Planner. You can find adventures near you and filter by season and difficulty level. There are weird and wonderful things to explore any time of year. The trip planner links to blog posts to help you plan your next adventure.
Happy exploring!
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