Northeast Washington Mushroom Festival

Baskets out at ten, back by two

The Northeast Washington Mushroom Festival takes over Happy Dell Park for one Saturday in spring. The park lies along Highway 395, which runs through town as West Third Avenue, at the corner of Juniper Street. The Kettle Falls Information Center stands next to it. The grounds hold a playground, a softball field, tennis courts, picnic tables and barbecue pits, a covered pavilion, a gazebo, a historical display, and a music stage. The festival runs from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., rain or shine, and admission is free. Visitors are asked to bring their own chairs or blankets, water bottles, umbrellas, and mushrooms. Drugs and alcohol are prohibited.

The day begins before the gates open. At 9 a.m. foray contestants sign in at the registration booth on the field. They get a safety briefing by the stage and a handout of maps. They carry their own baskets or mesh bags and their own tools for gathering. At 10 they leave for the woods. The contestants paid an entry fee, and in 2026 it was lower for those who registered online ahead of time. For the 2026 festival Jason Smith of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, led the foraging group from 10 to 2. He is a mycologist and the founder of Boundary Conditions. Contestants must be back in the park before 2 p.m., when their finds are identified, weighed, and judged. The two sponsoring web pages for 2026 differ on the number of foray competitions. The Inland Northwest Permaculture Guild’s page lists four, and the Children of Earth Coalition’s page lists three.

From 2 to 3:30 the mushroom identification table is open to everyone. Anyone may set down mushrooms they harvested earlier, from near or afar. Those specimens do not count toward the contest. “We want to see and discuss as many types of fungi as possible,” the festival page states.

The stage at Happy Dell Park

The rest of the crowd arrives as the foragers leave, when the vendors open at 10. In 2026 the Spokesman-Review counted more than 40 vendors. They sold culinary mushrooms along with pre-packaged food and drink. The festival does not allow hot or made-to-order food.

Talks on the stage fill the middle of the day. Children’s activities run alongside them from 10:30 to 1:30. The 2026 program opened with Gabriel Gaul at 10:30. He spoke on the history of fungi and facts about them, and he later helped at the identification tables. At 11:30 came Erin Nelson, the former owner of Spokane Mushrooms and the owner of Deer Park Pro Gardening, with a talk called “Wonders of Mushrooms.” At 12:30 Molly Quade, a graduate student at WSU, presented “Metarhizium: Selecting Fungal Strains to Improve Honey Bee Health.” Her research develops fungal strains to control Varroa mites in honey bee hives.

At 1:30 Nelson moved to the gazebo for a paid hour-long workshop. It was limited to 20 people, and each participant built an oyster mushroom growing kit to take home.

At 3 the Myco Art Contest is judged by the stage. Entrants bring drawings, photographs, paintings, and projects. At 3:15 the Myco Costume Contest follows, for anyone dressed as a favorite fungus or a mushroom-themed character. Both contests are open to all ages and free to enter, and judges name first, second, and third place. Contest and raffle winners are announced at 4. In 2026 Jami Rose Lord painted near the stage all day, gave painting lessons to whoever joined in, and auctioned the canvas when the winners were called.

Jason Smith gave a talk titled “Fungi, Mycelium and Mushrooms” in the late afternoon. The guild’s page lists it both for 4:00 and for 4:30. Live music runs from 5:30 to 7 p.m. In 2026 the players were Dave Blanck, Lyndsay Lee, and FungiLion, the name under which Gabriel Gaul records his own reggae. His page describes that music as having “an emphasis and love for mushrooms, earth and community.” The Children of Earth Coalition’s schedule also listed an open mic for the closing hours.

A morel contest in Illinois

According to the festival page, Gaul created the festival after attending an Illinois State Morel Mushroom Foraging competition. His own page at FungiPermastead, his business in Rice, Washington, says he has hunted mushrooms since he was six years old. It also lists among his qualifications a win at Morel Mania in Illinois. That page describes nine years of permaculture practice, four years on the board of the Inland Northwest Permaculture Guild, six years of commercial wildcrafting, and a Radical Mycology Network certification course. The festival page calls him a “mycologist, forager, cultivator and teacher of all things fungi.”

The guild describes itself as a network of permaculture practitioners living between the Cascade Range and the Rocky Mountains. It hosts the festival with the Northeast Washington Permaculture Guild. Its partners are FungiPermastead, Fungilion, the Children of Earth Coalition, BZ Farms, and Boundary Conditions.

Four springs in Kettle Falls

The first festival was held on May 27, 2023. A report on the Children of Earth Coalition’s site counted about 50 people in the foray contest and roughly 300 over the course of the day. Several people entered the costume and art contests. The raffle prizes included giant jars of dried morels. The report also noted that Rosemary Gladstar, the herbalist and author, enjoyed the festival and mentioned it two days later in her Mushroom 101 class at the Thrivalist Fair.

Sponsorship terms for 2024 offered passes for “the mushroom foray or the culinary contest.” The sponsors later wrote of steady growth over the first two years, reaching more than 40 vendors and 700 visitors. The third festival was held May 3, 2025, and the fourth on May 2, 2026.

Kelly RainbowButterfly served as festival and vendor coordinator through all four years. In September 2026 she announced that she was stepping down. “Like any healthy ecosystem, this festival has never been the work of one person,” she wrote. “It has flourished because so many different people have brought their own gifts to it.” The guild has asked for volunteers to take over outreach, vendor coordination, sign making, the information booth, and the contests. It reports holding hours of unedited video of past festivals.

The fifth annual festival is set for Saturday, May 1, 2027, at Happy Dell Park, hosted by the Inland Northwest Permaculture Guild.