Yakima Valley Mushroom Society

04/27/2026

May 2026 YVMS Members Only Events!
If you’ve been thinking about joining YVMS now is the perfect time; do some good, get to know some awesome people and awesome mushrooms!

May 9th, 8:30 am-4:00 pm. Forest Service Volunteer Day. The Society’s annual clean-up of a Forest Service campground in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest Natches Ranger District.

May 15-17th: Annual Multi-Day Spring Foray. Spend the weekend camping or cabin-ing and foraging in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. Experienced members can lead smaller foray groups. Take advantage of mushroom ID tables; they are great way to learn about what you and others find and boost your own identification confidence. Favorite spring edibles on the eastern slopes of the Cascades include (but aren’t limited to) morels, spring boletes, and puffballs.

The Yakima Valley Mushroom Society is a nonprofit, volunteer-supported organization founded to promote the understanding, enjoyment, cultivation, hunting, and identification of mushrooms and other fungi in a fun and welcoming environment.

04/23/2026

Tickets are still available for tonight!

Yakima Area Arboretum is hosting a begining mushroom foraging class on April 28th, 6-8pm. Registration Required.

https://campscui.active.com/orgs/YakimaAreaArboretum?orglink=camps-registration

04/20/2026

Gearing up for spring mushroom hunting???

Come out tonight to the Yakima Area Arboretum, 7-8:30pm for Michael Beug's presentation on Edible, Poisonous and Fascinating Fungi of the Columbia River Basin!

Free for YVMS members, $5 for non-members.

Copies of Beug's book, Mushrooms of Cascadia will be available

Follow or Message Michael

04/05/2026

We're getting excited for Michael Beug's presentation coming up in a couple weeks!

The Columbia River Basin has a tremendous diversity of habitats meaning that the diversity of fungi is fantastic with well over 1,000 named fungi and thousands more yet unnamed fungi in our region. In this talk I will present the best edible spring fungi and how to distinguish the species that can m...

03/20/2026

https://app.glueup.com/event/174948/

Check out this upcoming NAMA event.

Online mapping tools and apps like GeoForager, iNaturalist, Gaia, OnX, etc. are incredible resources for mushroom hunting. Navigating the woods or documenting your finds is only the beginning of their usefulness. Explore how mycologists and mushroom hunters gain insights into the habitats, seasonali...

02/05/2026

Join us for our February general membership meeting and find out what the club has in store this season at our potluck gathering. Doors open for setup at 6:30 and meeting starts at 7pm. To register and RSVP go to YVMS.org and renew your membership, login and go to events. Or show up and renew at the door. Current Members can register by clicking the link in the February newsletter that went out this am. Hope to see you there!

The Yakima Valley Mushroom Society is a nonprofit, volunteer-supported organization founded to promote the understanding, enjoyment, cultivation, hunting, and identification of mushrooms and other fungi in a fun and welcoming environment.

02/05/2026

Official Artwork for the 46th Annual Telluride Mushroom Festival created by Chris Adams of 🍄

We asked Chris to tell us about his thought process behind this year’s artwork and his thoughts surrounding the theme, “rewild” and here is what he shared with us:

“When the team shared the theme for the 2026 festival with me, my first impulse was to visualize some romanticized scene of humans dancing naked in the mountains with animals and mushrooms all around, or something like that…

Immediately, I started picking apart my assumptions, perspective and bias in that knee jerk vision: who are the people, how have they shifted from current social norms back into nature, what are the effects on the system they’re recentering, and-on-and-on.

The romantic nature lover in me wants to believe there is a path for humans to rewild by (re)learning our role as just one part of an interconnected system rather than a super species in charge of dismantling & restructuring systems and extracting resources to meet our short term needs and desires.

The cynic in me finds it more likely that we will work ourselves out of the equation altogether, or maybe already have. Leaving nature, perhaps particularly fungi, to rebuild, regenerate and reimagine what comes next.

I imagine the artwork as a compromise between these extreme visions of the human role in the Earth’s future.
If we’re lucky we will find a collective reframing of the human role in local & global ecosystems that allows us to fall back into communion rather than conflict with and consumption of the flora, fauna & funga all around us.

Visualize laying back buried in the thick fur of a Black Bear surrounded by visible & invisible systems of complex interdependency & magical mutualism.

Alternately, we can’t get our s**t together and the only way we exist in the future is as the remnants of our molecules reimagined as new organisms & organic matter.

Regardless of the interpretation I’m jealous of that skeleton’s fingers buried in the bear’s fur, and would take a lazy day surrounded by big trees & bigger mountains any old day.”

12/07/2025

After a rash of poisonings from Amanita phalloides among mostly Spanish speaking people in Northern California, we are posting this warning.

12/07/2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/06/us/california-wild-mushrooms-poison.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Officials said one person was killed and 20 others were poisoned after eating death cap mushrooms, which look and taste like safe mushrooms but can cause liver failure.

12/06/2025

Join the North American Mycological Association for the 2025 Fungi Film Fest
Wednesday, December 10th

NAMA is excited to host a special screening of the 2025 Fungi Film Fest, a one-night event celebrating all things fungal—art, science, storytelling, and more.

Pricing
• NAMA Members: $5
• Not a NAMA Member Yet? Join for $25 and watch the Film Fest for free.

Event Details & Signup:
https://app.glueup.com/event/movie-night-fungi-film-fest-2025-163317/




Mushroom lovers: you won’t want to miss this!! See you next Wednesday!

10/28/2025

The winner of the drawing for the bowl was Maira Richardson. Congratulations and thank you all for your support! Thank you Jeff Gibson for the donation.