This year’s fall rains helped make this year's Fungus Among Us Mushroom Festival a huge success. In addition to help from the weather, the Whistler Naturalists could not have offered all the talks, walks, cooking show, and school presentations without immense help from many people and organizations, as well as the hundreds of local residents who participated.

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We’d first like to thank the 24 mushroom experts from the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island who again volunteered their time. Their collective expertise and knowledge was probably the most impressive we’ve ever assembled. This event would also not be possible with multi-year support from the Whistler Community Foundation and the RMOW’s Community Enrichment Program. In addition, we’d like to single out Nesters for their incredible contributions, including most of the wild mushrooms for the cooking show.

The festival began last Thursday and Friday with two days of school presentations by our experts that reached over 700 students and included most classes at Spring Creek, Ecole la Passerelle, and Myrtle Philp Schools, two classes at Whistler Secondary, and four classes from Xet’olacw Community School in Mt. Currie.

The first presentation on Friday night was on the traditional and current uses of fungi in First Nations culture by Holly Bikadi (Lil’wat Nation), Leigh Joseph (Squamish Nation), and Andy MacKinnon. Next, Ann McCall and Elora Adamson spoke about the MycoMap project that uses DNA to help unravel mysteries in fungus identification. These informative talks were followed by a hilarious and sometimes educational glimpse into Kevin Trim’s love of everything fungal.

On Saturday morning, over 200 mushroom fans in 12 groups joined our experts for walks in various locations around Whistler Valley. The event shifted at 12:30 pm to the cooking show in which Chef Bruce Worden from Milestones described ways to cook wild mushrooms, then served his creations to grateful participants. We can’t thank Bruce enough for being an integral part of our event.

While people enjoyed Bruce’s cooking, the mushroom experts went into a frenzy of organizing and labelling at least 160 different species of fungi and slime moulds. Then, after less than two hours, we welcomed hundreds of enthusiasts to the full display tables. After preliminary tallying of results, we expect at least 25 species will be added to the master list compiled by the Whistler Biodiversity Project, and bring the local total to well over 1,000.

Last but not least, thanks to Ashley Bordignon, Melanie Tardif, Sabrina Hinitz, Chloe Van Loon, and Samantha Ray for all their help behind the scenes that made this year’s Fungus Among Us one of the best yet.

Watch for next year’s Fungus Among Us, as always on the weekend after Thanksgiving.

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Thanks to Joern Rohde for these photos: