2024 PSMS Annual Wild Mushroom Show

Our Wild Mushroom Show is one of the largest and most complete exhibits of mushrooms in the United States. Over 200 varieties of wild mushrooms will be displayed, identified, and classified as edible, poisonous, or valueless as food.

Visitors are welcome to bring in mushrooms from your garden or walks for our experts to identify. Be sure to collect the entire mushroom, including underground parts.

Exhibits will include something for all of the senses: A feel and smell display can be experienced after the slide show lecture and finished off by a delicious tasting of mushrooms. There are photography displays as well as a great selection of items for sale like mushroom field guides, cookbooks, t-shirts, and scientific materials for the serious mycologist. Visitors can discover facts about PSMS and obtain information about classes, field trips and other opportunities. Thank you for your interest and for supporting PSMS!

Location and Times

 

Admission fees

Adults $10, Students $5 with ID card, and children under 12 are free.

PSMS Members who are volunteering for the show are able to enter for free.

Mask-wearing is strongly recommended.

 

Speaker Schedule

Saturday October 19, 2024

Time	Speaker	Title of Lecture
1:00 - 2:00	Daniel Winkler	Fungal Fruits of the Forest - Edible Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest
2:15 - 3:15	Dr. Steve Trudell	Mycorrhizas: Foundation of Our Forests
3:30 - 4:30	Noah Siegel	Cascadia: A Fungal Paradise
4:45 - 5:45	Wren Hudgins	Foragers' Choice: The 20 Tastiest Wild Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest

Sunday October 20, 2024

Time	Speaker	Title of Lecture
11:00 - 12:00	Noah Siegel	Exploring the Unknown: Cryptic Mushroom Diversity in Your Backyard
12:15 - 1:15	Shannon Adams	Mushroom Identification Fundamentals: Learn to Recognize Mushrooms for Fun, Food, and Scientific Discovery
1:30 - 2:30	Daniel Winkler	Boletes of the Pacific Northwest and Beyond
2:45 - 3:45	Alana McGee	Truffle Hunting: Canine & Culinary Edition, a Focus on Food and What to Do with Them

Speaker Bios

Shannon Adams — Shannon is a passionate amateur mycologist and user experience researcher who lives in Seattle. Her interest in fungi started over 20 years ago when she relocated to the region and was impressed by the diversity of mushrooms she saw while hiking. What began as an artistic pursuit, painting botanical illustrations of fungi, evolved into a desire to identify and a deep fascination with fungal taxonomy, particularly with the genus Cortinarius.

Today, Shannon actively contributes to the field of mycology by observing, collecting, identifying, and describing new species. Her personal herbarium contains over 1,500 Cortinarius, she has described two species new to science and is currently working on additional new species. She is a frequent foray lead and event speaker - primarily teaching about the Cortinariaceae but also advocating for greater participation in community science. Shannon has been a longtime volunteer at PSMS - serving two terms on the PSMS Board, teaching classes in microscopy and acting as chair for the Mycoflora sequencing committee.

She looks forward to an ongoing regional contribution to Cortinarius taxonomy and to expanding the understanding of fungi in general.

Her talk title is: Mushroom ID Fundamentals: Learn to recognize mushrooms for fun, food and scientific discovery. Folds versus true gills? Rusty spore print? Viscid vs dry caps? This talk will show you how to recognize mushrooms for fun, food, and scientific discovery. Learn to identify common edible species by understanding key features that distinguish them. Improve your observation skills and become familiar with identification terms and concepts to effectively use identification books, guides and keys. Whether you're interested in foraging or studying mushrooms, this session provides the fundamentals of mushroom identification will examples of what identifiers are talking about.

Wren Hudgins — Wren joined PSMS in 1978 and was introduced to mushrooming by an informal guiding system the club had at that time. Over the following years that guiding system disappeared until about ten years ago when Wren decided to bring it back. As co-chair of the Field Trip Safety Committee, he created a Forest Navigation class and made that a requirement for training guides. The club now has enough trained guides that we can offer most beginners a guided group experience when they start mushrooming. Beyond field trips, Wren is on the Identification Committee, the Education Committee, helps teach classes, gives outreach presentations to groups outside the club, and sits on the Board of Trustees. For his presentation "Forager's Choice: The 20 Tastiest Wild Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest" Wren has polled his friends and esteemed colleagues and has asked them what THEY thought were their tastiest mushrooms from the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. Is there consensus among the experts on the best mushrooms? Find out at Wren's presentation!

Alana McGee, CPDT-KA, has over 12 years of experience training and educating humans and canines with reward-based systems about early socialization, development during critical periods, and canine scent detection, specifically regarding truffles. She is one of only a handful of proven professional truffle dog handlers in all of North America who harvests native truffles as well as works on European-style plantations or truffieres. In 2013 Alana and her truffle dogs found the first ever cultivated Perigord truffles in Canada. Alana is one of the driving forces behind the emergence of using dogs to harvest and locate truffles in the Pacific Northwest and for use in scientific discovery in other parts of North America as well as helping to establish the culinary marketplace and build the infrastructure for Pacific Northwest truffles, on a global scale, and has developed a training curriculum specifically designed for truffle dog teams working on commercial orchards. For those of you who attended Alana's previous presentation, this year it will be different, with a focus more on food and what to do with the truffles after you find them.

Noah Siegel — Noah is one of North America's foremost field mycologists; he has spent over three decades seeking, photographing, identifying, and furthering his knowledge about all aspects of macrofungi. He travels and lectures extensively across America, following the mushrooms from coast to coast.

Noah was the recipient of the 2022 North American Mycological Association's Award for Contributions to Amateur Mycology. His primary research interest is on the taxonomy and systematics of fungi. He authored, along with Christian Schwarz, Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast, a Comprehensive Guide to the Fungi of Coastal Northern California and Mushrooms of Cascadia, a Comprehensive Guide to Fungi of the Pacific Northwest, as well as A Field Guide to the Rare Fungi of California's National Forests. He is currently working on Mushrooms of Alaska, with Steve Trudell and Kate Mohatt.

Steve Trudell, Ph.D. — Steve is a forest ecologist and itinerant educator who has been hunting, photographing, and learning about mushrooms for over 35 years. He is a life member of NAMA, Chair of NAMA's Literature Committee, member of the Education, Photography, and Website committees, and previously served as Vice President. Author of, and photographer for, Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest (with Joe Ammirati), Tricholomas of North America: A Mushroom Field Guide (with Alan Bessette, Arleen Bessette, and Bill Roody), and Mushrooms of Alaska's National Forests (with Kate Mohatt and Karen Dittman), he has taught mycology, botany, and biology courses at the University of Washington, The Evergreen State College, and Bastyr University, as well as workshops at many festivals, NAMA forays, and local mushroom club forays. His particular interest is in understanding why there is such a tremendous diversity of mushroom-fungi and the roles that they play in forest carbon and nutrient cycling.

Daniel Winkler — Daniel is the author of field guides to Edible Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest and California, Amazon Mushrooms and brand a new Field guide to Medicinal Mushrooms of North America with Robert Rogers. He grew up collecting and eating wild mushrooms in the Alps and has been foraging for over 20 years in the PNW and beyond, sharing his enthusiasm as a mushroom educator and guide and as PSMS vice-president. In his presentations he is combining his stunning photography with an often funny blend of entertaining stories and scientific information; he likes to refer to as "edutainment". Having been in love with mushrooms since early childhood Daniel managed to bend his career as an ecologist and geographer focused on High Asia towards researching rural Tibet's enormous fungal economy. His Cordyceps research has been featured in The Economist, National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, BBC World Service etc. In the last decade Daniel started exploring neotropical fungi. With his travel agency MushRoaming, Daniel is organizing mushroom focused eco-adventures to Tibet, Bhutan, China, the Amazon, Colombia, the Austrian Alps and the Pacific Northwest since 2007 [www.mushroaming.com].