Coz the Shroom said:

Yes, I am amazed that Lee Walstad himself steered me the wrong way.  maybe it was intentional. 

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In any case, I'm very excited to learn that this year there are actually photographs of mescaleroensis out there, and I may know just where to look!

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Lee told me that they don't always bruise blue

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, so I'll take spore prints and bioassay anything that looks chocolate brown instead of rusty brown.

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No need to eat any dodgy mushrooms, just post the photos here.



A week ago I took a trip to Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona to find the rare Psilocybe species.    I wrote to Lee Walstad who discovered P. mescaleroensis, Joel Greene who discovered Psilocybe hopii and my friend Dennis, who discovered a new Psilocybe in the White Mountains of Arizona.  I went with my friend who discovered a Psilocybe which might be P. quebecensis last year in Colorado.    It was a pretty amazing journey....Which I plan to make a thread about.    All three people responded and offered to go mushroom hunting with me, and all three Psilocybes were photographed.

The trip started in Colorado, land of the legal weed:



I then went to the Telluride mushroom festival to give talks on psilocybin mushrooms and the mushrooms of Mexico.  That was a lot of fun.

Telluride is beautiful.



It was cool hunting mushrooms with Laura Guzman in the USA.




Laura with Gary Lincoff.    Two extremely cool people.




Back on topic, I decided I wanted photos of Psilocybe mescaleroensis and specimens for DNA sequencing, so I googled for Lee Walstad, found a youtube interview with him and contacted him via Facebook.  I was surprised when he replied and agreed to meet up.


Lee is a very interesting guy, and unlike anyone I have ever met.  I expected him to be about 70 years old, with a mountain man with big white beard.  The truth could not be more different - he is a scientist working on electronic devices which change the weather and a camera that can take photos back in time using spinning lenses, which he plans to use to get photographs of Perseus. 




Regarding the mushroom in the OP of this thread, it's Leratiomyces riparius, formerly Stropharia riparia.  I taught Lee a lot about mushroom identification, and he can now identify this species and won't confuse it with Psilocybe anymore.  The canyon where he took you and where that mushroom grows is not the spot with P. mescaleroensis, though it's not super far from there.  The canyon isn't the right habitat nor elevation.




Here is Lee in the holotype location for Psilocybe mescaleroensis:



And the first photo of Psilocybe mescaleroensis:



And some more...



I promised Lee I would keep the location secret, so I won't be telling anyone where they grow.    I will say that they do not grow in the spot listed in the scientific paper he coauthored, nor in the spot he wrote on the slip of paper he sent to Gaston Guzman.  They do occur in New Mexico, in a place that is very cold and gets a ton of rain.


Interestingly, the ITS sequence of Psilocybe mescaleroensis and Psilocybe hopii from Arizona are exactly the same, which is something that I have not seen in other species of Psilocybe.  Psilocybe hopii is definitely different though - on this recent trip I got pics of that too.  P. mescaleroensis has an annulus and P. hopii does not.

leschampignons said:

very cool. Were spore prints taken as part of this collection?

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SkagitHunter said:

Awesome hijacking Alan! Great thread

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Lee sounds like an interesting guy... Where these found in a wilderness park by chance?

maynardjameskeenan said:

Lee sounds like an interesting guy... Where these found in a wilderness park by chance?

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Heyowana said:

Any bioassays of that species yet? Cool thread with the additional material from Alan Rockefeller.

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Coz the Shroom said:

Maybe the year I picked them they were weak and didn't blue.  I picked them again, same ones, they blued.  Have not yet bioassayed.  They look the same as the ones in Alan's pictures.  I have a pretty good idea where that picture was taken, as I have always gone stomping around out there on that trail. This has been an exceptionally good year for mushrooms of all kinds in the forest.  A couple of years ago when I was still looking for them, we were in pretty deep drought.  If my original pictures don't look too much like the ones in Lee's pictures, that's because they're some of the larger ones.  Everything matches up though, including habitat and season.

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