MAGIC MUSHROOMS

My grandpa always said that he wanted to eat psychedelics on his deathbed.

I grew up hunting mushrooms with him in Colorado forests, watching him bend down to flip them over, inspect the undersides, dust them off. He showed me how to identify them, to intuit where they were most likely to grow.

He taught me to look for them at the edges of meadows, amidst rocky craters interspersed with strawberry plants. We were always looking for Boletus edulis—a choice edible. Early spring rain promised a good bolete year. But it had to rain later in the summer too, so basically you were hoping for rain all summer.

We would drive to the mountains in search of auburn caps with glossy stems and delicate pores. If we were lucky and other foragers hadn’t gotten there first, we returned home with our baskets full. We would fry them in olive oil and shower generous amounts of them on our pizza or pasta.

My grandpa compared mushroom hunting to not just learning a new language, but to a new awareness of life.

I come from a long line of mushroom hunters. My grandparents founded the Telluride Mushroom Festival, a four-day mycology conference in the Rocky Mountains. Guests attend lectures, forage, participate in culinary competitions, and trip.

The Telluride Mushroom Festival was, for me, a formative and surreal part of my childhood. The multi-day affair always culminated in a parade, in which everyone would dress up like mushrooms and march down the streets of the sleepy mountain town, chanting and banging on drums. We wore papier-mâché hats painted with dots and tie dye shirts, watching as people around us twirled and shouted, in various states of lucidity. My grandparents especially loved the festival and the parade. They would tape white puffballs to their denim hats and carry signs that advocated for the legalization of psychedelics. A large mushroom float pulled by a red pickup truck, painted like a shroom with white patches, trailed behind the procession, honking.

It felt like a fairytale. After hunting mushrooms all day, we ate our harvested crop with fresh peach pie. Our cohort was an eclectic group of mycologists—Paul Stamets, Art Goodtimes, Linnea Gillman, the Adams family, John Sir Jesse, and others—who were open and accepting. We reflected on our favorite works of art, music, and poetry from the day, and discussed the spots where we’d found the most mushrooms. We flung Latin names around. Sometimes, we even tried new species that had never before been eaten.

As a young girl at the parade, I wasn’t aware of how many people were tripping. I thought Telluride was one of the most beautiful places in the world, and that it just made everyone really happy. One of my earliest memories is of my older cousin babysitting my brother and me in Telluride while tripping on mushrooms. We were eating pizza and swimming around in the pool at our hotel when she told me she was on them. I asked her if it was making her sad. “No Nell, it’s magical,” she said, laughing.

My grandpa’s interest in psychedelics was scientific, not spiritual. In 1981, he founded the festival with the help of my dad, my grandma Joanne Salzman, Gary Lincoff (a self-taught mycologist and author based out of New York), and Andrew Weil (a doctor known for pioneering integrative and natural medicinal techniques). The festival began in 1977 as a conference in Aspen, primarily for doctors who wanted to learn more about mushroom poisoning. As this group of credentialed physicians—my grandpa included—delved into mycology, some became interested in psychedelic mushrooms. But about half of the organizers rejected any inquiry into the topic. So the group split after the 1979 conference, and the psychedelic side set up their tents elsewhere, eventually landing in Telluride, then a low-key, hippyish town, in 1981.

In Telluride, the festival became a yearly event where a big group of people could gather to talk openly about psychedelics. Those who were interested in magic mushrooms could come talk to scientists who were promoting their medicinal effects, advocates who favored legalization, artists who wanted to interpret mushrooms, chefs who wanted to enjoy them for dinner, and others who wanted to be mush

an introduction to mycology

rooms, literally. The early festival days were run on a tight budget. People camped, hiked, and went to the high school cafeteria for meals. There was a palpable energy at the festival. Experts in the field—Rick Doblin, John Cage, Sasha Schulgin, Laura Huxley (wife of Aldous Huxley), Gordon Wassan, Weil, and more—felt they were really onto something.

Around this time (from 1982–1995), my grandparents led “Mushroom Study Tours,” trips across the world. They met local foragers, and ate and used mushrooms in Russia, Japan, India, Thailand, Burma, Madagascar, Borneo, and Papua New Guinea. With no liability coverage, what happened on these trips was certainly, at times, illegal. In Peru, a participant, tripping on Ayahuasca, fell into an empty swimming pool while on mushrooms and broke his hip. In Burma, a 80-year-old participant broke his pelvis after the carriage they were riding tipped over. But even injured participants kept joining the trips.

One year, the Telluride cohort ate Amanita muscaria, also called the Fly Agaric. I was too young to partake, but my dad said that they sat in a room together and sweated out their inner demons. He explained that they went into it knowing that the worst that could have happened would be temporary sickness. “Still, the side effects are not pleasant,” he said, explaining that he’s concluded that the mushroom is a poison, not a psychedelic, but that the line between the two is not always clear. (Pro Tip: This mushroom can be boiled, sauteed, and eaten as a nutty-tasting food, with the poison going into the water.)

My dad’s love of mushrooms extends into our life at home in Denver. He calls himself an “urban mushroom hunter.” He has a green thumb—plots full of eggplants, kale, cucumbers, pumpkins—but he likes to point out the way that mushrooms are just as much a part of his gardening practices as the plants. I remember when I was little, he pulled down a husk of corn that was growing black mold and told me that it was beautiful. There was a plume of soft, velvety truffle peaking through the shucks. “It’s Huitlacoche,” he told me. “Corn smut.”

I first became enamored with mushrooms because the people I loved most—my dad and grandpa—found them so remarkable. I felt like I had a secret, a world of treasures that only I and a few people knew how to identify or find. No one but me realized that the dark fungus that crept onto ears of corn was actually a mild and earthy delicacy sold online and in special Mexican markets. No one realized the white caps that popped up in grass lawns were actually as special as flowers, and could be eaten in pasta or make you have wild dreams.

I became skilled at identifying them, learning both their Latin and common names. There’s the Phallus impudicus, an aptly named mushroom which attracts flies to the black slime that grows atop its shaft and smells strongly of semen. Agaricus campestris is related to the portobello mushroom you find in the store. Coprinus comatus is great for soups and hors d’oeuvres. Flammulina velutipes, or “Velvet Foot,” is a brown-stemmed white-spored mushroom that grows out of the snow, often called the “Winter Mushroom.”

City mushroom hunting is, as my dad likes to point out, addictive. Once you start noticing mushrooms, it’s impossible to stop. You get distracted. They’re all over the place. Especially after it rains. “Watch out. Your life will become a mushroom hunt. Life is a mushroom hunt,” he’ll often say. “mycophobic.” It’s his life mission to convert them. He goes so far as to suggest eating the mushrooms that grow out of the carpet in your bathroom, to prove that they’re harmless. But for all that I appreciate and have learned to love about mushrooms, I’m more understanding of mycophobia. Walking through the woods in Telluride, it would sometimes dawn on me that a small misidentification could make me deathly ill or even kill me.

Chlorophyllum molybdites—nicknamed “The Vomiter”—induces serious gastrointestinal distress, but looks like a harmless Agaricus that sprouts in garden beds and in between cracks in the sidewalk. Allegedly, it tastes delicious, so people are tempted to want more of it. Coprinopsis atramentaria supposedly makes you sick when consumed with alcohol, and the Galerina—a small, brown, nondescript mushroom that grows out of wood—is the most common Colorado mushroom that can actually kill you. But few have eaten it—and no one’s died from it—mostly because it doesn’t look good.

All of these poisonous mushrooms have identifiers to tell you they aren’t safe for eating. Still, while members of my family collect mushrooms on bike rides or walks through the city, I understand why it’s also a terrifying prospect. There is a certain degree of risk involved in putting things from your backyard or on the trail into your frying pan. You really need to know the look-alikes—which edible mushrooms look like poisonous ones. It’s a lot to learn at once. “Learn one or two a year,” my dad tells hunting newbies. “Don’t overwhelm yourself when you’re first trying.”

The prospect of a bad trip is also terrifying. Scientists in the early days of the mushroom conference thought a lot about this. Gary Lincoff spoke frequently about his own trips at the event, recommending James Bakalar and Lester Grinspoon’s The Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered (1979) to learn more about the safest way to do psychedelics, specifically the chapter on their therapeutic uses.

Though there has been public awareness about the beneficial effects of psychedelic mushrooms since the 1950s, landmark studies performed by NYU and Johns Hopkins in recent years have advanced a lot of this earlier, more fringe advocacy for psychedelics in the medical sphere. There is now readily-available evidence that even one-time doses of psilocybin—a compound found in most psychedelic mushrooms—is associated with improvements in emotional and existential dread after terminal cancer diagnoses. Psilocybin is also proven to significantly reduce immediate and sustained feelings of anxiety and depression.

At the festival, Lincoff liked to cite Timothy Leary’s advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Leary was a leading counterculture psychologist who argued that human emotion could be affected for the better by mind-altering substances. Lincoff recommended Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (1964), based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a highly regarded Buddhist text. Metzner (who spoke at the Telluride Festival) and Leary’s work appropriates Buddhist principles of death and rebirth as a metaphor for the experience of ego death, or depersonalization caused by psychedelics. It’s a manual of sorts, a way of directing people to understand and use mushrooms. There are blank pages included for people to write down their thoughts and observations. “Honor the experience you’re having,” Lincoff told us. “Give yourself three days. A day of preparation, the event, and then a day to recover and reflect.”

Magic mushrooms—or mushrooms that contain psilocybin—have been used for thousands of years around the world. Like LSD and similar psychedelic drugs, magic mushrooms are neither addictive nor life-threatening. As long as you have the right mushroom, a lethal dose is nearly impossible. No matter how much you take or how often you take them, the whole experience is over in 6 hours. They can be life-changing, or just get you into a different mindset. “The safest kind of psychedelic out there,” Lincoff often said to me of mushrooms, grinning.

Nonetheless, for political, not scientific reasons, psilocybin is currently a Schedule I drug, meaning it is not currently accepted for use of any kind in the United States. However, in 2018 researchers at Johns Hopkins did recommend that it be reclassified from Schedule I to Schedule IV for medical use. Several cities in the US have recently decriminalized mushrooms—Denver, Oakland, Santa Cruz, and Ann Arbor. And while the data is meaningful and significant, most mushroom advocates do not argue for overnight legalization. Such a step would almost certainly backfire, as inevitable stories about people having bad trips would spread, misrepresenting the potential for safe consumption of mushrooms. The legalization process should be deliberate and intentional, experts say.

As I’ve gotten older and become more interested in the psychedelic and scientific aspects of mushrooms as opposed to their fairy-tale-like qualities, I’ve begun to understand more and more that my grandpa and his cohort were onto something in the 1980s. At the time, mushroom hunting was viewed as a taboo pastime.

Mushroom hunting, however, is a practice that has been undertaken in indigenous communities around the world. The popularization of mushroom hunting has simply made commercial a tradition that has been practiced for more than 10,000 years. In the 1950s, R. Gordon Wasson first found out that many cultures consumed magic mushrooms for religious purposes. He researched these worship ceremonies, traveling to various indigenous villages in Mexico to try them. In 1955, he brought them back to the United States from the village of Huautla de Jiménez, helping to birth the psychedelic counterculture that the Telluride Festival emerged from.

And only in the past 20 years has mushroom hunting shifted from being hippy to hipster. My grandpa gave the festival to the Telluride Institute a few years ago, which now charges a hefty $400 per person. While I’m excited to see where the new awareness about mushrooms goes in the coming years, this monetization of the experience does feel slightly wrong to me. Mushroom hunting is marketed as accessible and sustainable, but such a high payment for entry makes it decidedly inaccessible.

Part of what’s so special about mushroom hunting to me is its universality. Mushrooms grow in all different conditions. The same type of mushroom can be found in the mountains of Colorado and in Japan and in Russia. Anyone who wants to learn to trust themselves to identify specific taxonomic features can become a mushroom hunter.

When someone first starts mushroom hunting, they begin to notice the subtleties of ecosystems. Taught by experts around me, I have observed these patterns. I’ve learned about the mutually beneficial relationship between some of the mushrooms and the root ends of many trees—willow, pine, oak, birch. I can identify mushrooms based on their patches, gills, rings, stalks. Although I’ve been doing it my whole life, I still feel like I learn something new each time I go on a mushroom hunt.

Mushroom hunting, though a seemingly trivial pastime, has brought joy to my family across generations. It has allowed us to get into the Colorado mountains, to slow down and enjoy the scenery of our hikes, and to cook, eat and trip together.