Locals who are my age or older used to pick salal to make pocket-money when they were kids but nowadays the local working class gets welfare and doesn't need to earn money so illegal Mexicans make a living cutting salal in the surrounding forests and selling it to florists.
The berries are edible but not that tasty. The local aborigines used to dry the berries and mix them with a bit of bear fat as a sort of energy bar for winter snacks. Nowadays chefs make a jam or chutney out of them to serve with roasted or barbecued salmon.
The second most prolific berry is the black huckleberry or evergreen huckleberry (vaccinium ovatum.) This a delicious berry but very tiny and you have to strip them off the bush in handfuls to get a decent mouthful. They have pretty white flowers in Spring and the new foliage is red or copper.
The red huckleberry or deciduous huckleberry (vaccinium parvifolium) is not as tasty as the black one and slightly tart.
The salmon berry (rubus spectabilis) has just as many fierce thorns as a blackberry and is basically just a sour yellowish orange "blackberry." The bright mauve flower is spectacular (hence the Latin name) and has now been hybridized into a garden shrub.
The thimble-berry (rubus parviflorus) is called that because the flesh comes off the inner core when you pick it and it is hollow like a thimble. These are like mildly flavored raspberries and much prized by me because they do not have thorns.
The Himalayan blackberry (rubus discoloris) is not a native plant but was imported as a commercial fruit. It has naturalized all the way from southern California to BC and, despite its delicious fruit, is a pest forming thick hedges of fiercely thorned bushes.
Our native Oregon blackberry or bear-berry (rubus ursinus) crawls along the ground and forms horrible tripping hazards with it's ten foot long shoots. The berry is even more delicious than the Himalayan blackberry but you sure pay a price for it when one of its long thorny shoots slices through your ankles and trips you up.
