Fungus among us at Quinault Rainforest Mushroom Festival

On Saturday, Lake Quinault School welcomed the second year of the Quinault Rainforest Mushroom Festival, organized by Shores and Spores, led by Barbara Smith, Corinne Srsen and Danielle McGowen.

More than 800 showed up in attendance and turned the school into an at-capacity event with endless possibilities on this sunny weekend.

This charming festival included over 30 artisan vendors from surrounding areas of Grays Harbor, multiple informative booths, and five food trucks. Artisans included hand-carved wooden bowls, art, knitwear, woven baskets, teas, tinctures, skincare and more.

Informative booths were in collaboration with Timberland Library for their Kid Zone, and the Kitsap Peninsula Mycological Society provided facts on mushrooms and their health and environmental benefits. Activities like face painting, snake and slug observing, and art contests provided a space for children. The shopping areas ranged from the school gym to outdoors with covered seating. In the outdoor section, there were musicians like Colin Gage playing at certain points in the day, which was a fresh addition to the festival this year.

Workshops and forays offered a chance for attendees to learn and embrace the forms in which mushrooms can be used, and have been for centuries. These workshops cost $35-$50 and provided opportunities like a mushroom dye workshop, forest bathing, mushroom extraction for tinctures, multiple guided mushroom forays, cultivation workshops for learning to grow mushrooms using a log, and culinary workshops for two different times of day for each activity. Every aspect of the day had a timely arrangement, and happenings were available throughout the entire day in chunks to ensure a consistent flow of people and engagement.

In addition, there were various key speakers, including Noah Siegel, Aaron Hilliard, Daniel Winkler and Rose Tursi.

Barbara Smith and Danielle McGowen are two of the three busy organizers of Quinault Rainforest Mushroom Festival, and they plan practically all year round to make sure the festival runs smoothly and that everyone involved has a wonderful time in the process.

“Last year, we had one morning speaker, and an afternoon speaker, and from there, we had three workshops, and this year, we decided to expand the activities in the morning to five. We have a morning foray, an afternoon, then we have the morning and afternoon culinary, that’s a really popular one. The same with how to grow logs, and how to grow your own mushrooms. Then we added the music, and bingo, some new elements. This year, we collaborated with the Quinault Lodge, and we had a four-star course meal at the Lodge, and a speaker,” Smith said. “This gal said to me today, as I saw her in the parking lot, ‘This is such a great place to come, because I’ve seen people here that I haven’t seen in such a long time. Celebrating mushrooms, nature, and seeing these people.’ She said that to me, and it gave me goosebumps.”

McGowen also had some words on the impact of the festival and how it all started.

“The biggest part of it is that we love this community that we’re a part of, and we want to find opportunities to showcase and highlight the people, the small businesses, and the farms that are in Grays Harbor. This is reflected in our planning of the mushroom festival with everything that we do. It’s been sort of surreal since we moved up here. It felt like there were a lot of opportunities. This is such an interesting, tight-knit community that you don’t always see that from the outside until you really start to talk to the people, and they’re all so involved and excited about all of the different opportunities and the networking,” McGowen said. “It started with Barb and Corinne. Barb had been to the festival that they had done at the Quinault Lodge for a couple of years and really enjoyed it. It had been discontinued. She was looking for a way to get it restarted because she thought it was just such a special thing, and she met Corinne Srsen, who is very knowledgeable about mushrooms, and they both got pretty excited about the idea. Corinne started the Coastal Shores and Spores Mycological Society. Then, from there, the Shores and Sports Club, along with Barb, started planning for the first mushroom festival, which was last year.”

If you’d like to volunteer next year, or learn more about the festival, you can find them at https://www.shoresandspores.com/qrmushfest.