2024 Mount Pisgah Arboretum Mushroom Festival

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Table of Contents

Festival Planning

This is something that is not usually mentioned in the highlights of the Mount Pisgah Arboretum (MPA) Mushroom Festival. But, perhaps it is time that it was mentioned, especially given this years “twist”. Planning meetings for the October Mushroom Festival always begin in June. The MPA staff schedules and leads monthly meetings which includes representatives of the MPA, the Cascade Mycological Society (CMS), and Lane Community College (LCC). This years planning team twist was the Arboretum staff had an almost complete change in staff (9 out of 10) during 2023. The new Executive Director, Ilana Jakubowski, and Environmental Educator, Kevin House were the primary MPA planners for the 2024 festival and had never even attended an MPA Mushroom Festival. Fortunately, CMS Display Coordinates Peg Boulay and Bruce Newhouse along with CMS member and LCC instructor Susie Newhouse had a wealth of historical knowledge of the festival to offer. In addition to Peg, Bruce, and Suzie, CMS also had two new Festival Volunteer Coordinators join the planning team; Dan Berlant and Alan Shearin.

While CMS and LCC coordinates and staffs all of the mushroom related displays and activities at the festival. The MPA staff is responsible for all of the festival infrastructure, vendors, music, food, children’s activities, scarecrow contest, cider pressing, hay rides, nature walks, parking, logistics, advertising, and ticket sales. When all was said and done, the new MPA staff performed flawlessly; and we look forward to working with them for many years to come.

Field Trips to Collect for the Festival

CMS had four Member Field Trips to collect for the festival. Each was targeted to maximize the diversity of the mushrooms residing in differing habitats:

  • Cheshire Mayrsohn – Oregon coast just south of Florence
  • Lee Yamada – Higher elevations of Cascades past the Willamette Pass on Hwy-58
  • Cheshire Mayrsohn – Higher elevations of the Cascades out Hwy-126 past Belknap Springs
  • Matt Mathiason – Coast Range area between Veneta and Mapleton

Individual CMS members and even our guest experts also went out to gather up both a diversity of mushrooms and specific mushroom species.

Christian Schwarz Special Presentation

CMS was happy to welcome Christian Schwarz for a special presentation on Friday night prior to the festival. The event was held at the Unitarian Universalist Church which offers a larger space and nice cushy seats in their main sanctuary. Christin spoke about the broad bioregions of the United States from the perspective of mushrooms (which sometimes align with bioregions of plants and animals… but not always!). From the chilly and damp temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest to the subtropical hardwood hammocks of Florida; from the arid interior deserts to the alpine crest of the Rocky Mountains. Christian took us on a a pictorial tour of some of the country’s distinct macrofungal communities.

Although Christian has primarily worked as a field mycologist and mycology educator, he is passionate about biodiversity in general, and ecology, evolution, and especially biogeography. He has co-authored two field guides — Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast and Mushrooms of Cascadia, both with Noah Siegel. He primarily spends his time seeking, photographing, collecting, teaching about, and publishing research on North American macrofungi. He works with the California Fungal Diversity Survey (CA FUNDIS), and has served on the IUCN Red List Working Group for North American Fungi. He is a research associate of the Ken Norris Center for Natural History at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches undergraduate courses in mycology and community science

Christian also volunteered to assist with mushroom identification on Saturday. Thank you very much!

Mushroom Display Statistics

Total # of species – 414, this was our second highest year since we began keeping records in 2007. Our highest year was in 2019 with 542 species. We have averaged 359 species since 2007.

Number of new species – 45 (included in the 414 species). This is not the most new species, but this does beat our average of 40 new species per year since 2007.

A Thank you to our Guest Experts and LCC Students

CMS was happy to welcome back guest experts Steve Trudell and Noah Siegel for 2024. Noah and Steve are the key to having mushrooms identified to species on our very large mushroom display. Then on Sunday, they staff the Expert ID table to identify mushrooms that are brought in, interact with festival goers, and answer everyone’s questions about their favorite mushrooms.

Assisting with identification on Saturday was local expert Ron Hamill and guest expert Efrén Cázares.  Without Efren, many coral mushrooms go into the cannot identify pile as most of them require not only an expert, but also a microscope. Bitty Roy took the helm of triage (pre-identification sorting) while Peg Boulay and Aryanna Ferguson made sure mushroom identification cards were ready when needed.

And, as always students from the Lane Community College Biology of Mushroom class were on hand to place the identified mushrooms out onto the display.

Award winning journalist interviews members on festival setup day

If you were at the Mount Pisgah Arboretum to help setup for the 2024 Mushroom Festival, you probably noticed Meera Subramanian interviewing several CMS members for the feature article of the Orion magazine’s summer of 2025 issue dedicated to the Future of Fungi. Meera also did interviews at the Yachats Mushroom Festival the weekend before. Of course not everyone she interviewed is featured in the article, but you will know the two main characters: Christian Schwartz who was our featured guest speaker for the festival and our own Ron Hamill who is pictured right with Meera.

You can read the full article here, and also read Meera’s expanded notes on her Substack feed. You will recognize quite a few more past and present CMS members in her Substack notes including: Joe Spivack and Cathy, Chef Joseph, Jeem Peterson, Trent and Kristen Blizzard, Susie Holmes, and Molly Widmer.

You may also view the virtual launch of the Future of Fungi issue here, purchase a single issue print copy here, or subscribe to the Orion magazine here. 

Meera Subramanian is an award-winning freelance journalist who writes narrative nonfiction about home, in the personal and planetary sense, in a time of climate crisis. Her work has appeared in publications such as Nature, The New York Times, The NewYorker.com, and Orion. She is the author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis and teaches creative nonfiction at Sewanee School of Letters in Tennessee. Previously, she was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, Fulbright-Nehru senior research fellow, board president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University. She is currently a FRONTIERS Science Journalism fellow in residency at the Basque Center for Climate Change (BC3) in Bilbao, Spain but her home base is in the US, on a glacial moraine on the edge of the Atlantic. Meera is a perpetual wanderer who can’t stop digging in the dirt to plant perennials and looking up in search of birds.

Freeman Rowe Memorial Bench Dedication

The Cascade Mycological Society held a dedication of the Freeman Rowe Memorial Bench during the 2024 Mount Pisgah Arboretum Mushroom Festival. The bench honors Freeman Rowe who left us on October 7, 2020 shortly before the 2020 MPA Virtual Mushroom Festival. An effort began in November of 2021 to raise funds for the bench. Please enjoy this video of the dedication. And, a big thank you to Marcia Peeters and Cheshire Mayrohn for organizing and presiding over the dedication.

Talks on the Terrace

The 2024 Mushroom Festival brought back culinary presentations to Talks on the Terrace for all of the fungal foodies! CMS foodie Heather Sielicki was on hand to emcee a full line up of mushroom experts and chefs who talked about how to select, prepare, and preserve your favorite fungal finds, and they did not disappoint! We requested tastings, and they gave us meals!

Valerie Nguyen, Fungi for the People – Mushroom bao buns with medicinal mushroom chili crisp oil and Reishi tea tasting. If you have never had bao buns, learn about them here.

Trent Blizzard, President of the North American Mycological Association – Preserving Wild Mushrooms

Kristen Blizzard of Modern Forager – Pickling Perceptions – Invigorate your favorite recipes with pickled mushrooms.

Jennifer Macone of The Mushroomery talked about Medicinal Mushrooms and how to incorporate them into your favorite recipes.

Chef David Erickson of Painting with food taught us how to make his signature Mushroom  canapés, including a vegan version.

CMS Sales Booth

The Mushroom Festival is CMS’s most expensive event of the year; but is also it’s largest fundraiser of the year. While some mycological societies have a single t-shirt for members to purchase; CMS has a new t-shirt designed by a local artist printed every year just in time for the festival. This year’s t-shirt design was a nod to Freeman Rowe. In addition to both long and short sleeved CMS t-shirts, this year’s CMS sales booth also offered a variety of hat types with CMS logos, the always popular CMS Wild Mushroom Cookbook and mushroom magnets, earrings, and felted pins donated by Sandy’s Shrooms.

A big thank you also goes out to Dr. Michael Beug who was on hand in the sales booth to sign copies of his latest mushroom ID book, Mushrooms of Cascadia: An Illustrated Key; a portion of which went towards the CMS scholarship fund. And also to David Pilz who donated 30 Myco Bandanas with all proceeds going to CMS scholarships.

The total net proceeds from this year’s CMS Sales booth were $3, 141.15!

Proceeds earmarked for MCLO DNA Sequencing (Magnets/wine charms) $287.95
Proceed earmarked for Scholarships/grants (Cookbooks & Other Sandy crafts) $952.34
Proceed earmarked for General funds (Apparel, other) $1,265.62
Michael Beug book and Myco bandanas donated to the club; sales are to go towards Freeman Rowe scholarship $635.24

The Mushroom Festival Myco Blitz

The mushroom festival mycoblitz is just one more way to get involved in supporting both the mushroom festival and citizen science. The 2024 Festival Mycoblitz was conducted Oct. 19, 2024 through Oct. 28, 2024. During this time period in Lane County there were a total of 1821 macrofungi observations made by 309 observers/participants. We had 411 species on display at the festival while the Festival Mycoblitz was 5 behind with 406 unique species.

In addition to those who made observations, a big thank you also goes to the 119 citizen scientists who assisted with identifying observations. This is the 3rd year in a row that August Jackson took the top spot with 477 identifications. And, none of this would happen without CMS MLCO taxonomy team members Bruce Newhouse & Susie Holmes who organized and monitored the event.

You will find the Festival Mycoblitz on iNaturalist here; and a complete report on the mycoblitz stats on the CMS Website.

Post Festival KLCC Interview and News

On this edition of Oregon On The Record, host Michael Dune talks with Chris Melotti, President of the Cascade Mycological Society, about how fungi are a critical member of the ecosystem throughout our region.

The society does a lot to educate the public about mushrooms, how to forage for them safely and how to appreciate what they do for the environment. The marvelous, miraculous mushroom, may be the unsung hero of our forests.

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Also on KLCC – a photo review of the 2024 MPA Mushroom Festival.

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