On Friday, March 13, someone in Humboldt County ate mushrooms a friend had foraged and shared with a small group. The picker was experienced. By Saturday the person who ate them was in a local emergency room. Within days they were transferred to an out-of-area intensive care unit, suffering from amatoxin poisoning. State health officials later identified the mushrooms as Western Destroying Angel, a death cap relative, collected in Six Rivers National Forest within Humboldt County and mistaken for puffballs by a forager who knew what they were doing.
That case is why this year's Humboldt Bay Mycological Society Mushroom Fair carries more weight than the version that ran in past Novembers. The 2026 fair is set for Sunday, November 22, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Arcata Community Center. It is the same event that has run since 1978, but it lands several months after Humboldt got a firsthand lesson in how easily an edible-looking mushroom can kill.
A season, not an incident
The Humboldt case did not happen in isolation. Between November 2025 and the following May, California's Poison Control System logged an unusual spike in mushroom poisonings statewide, a run officials described to the North Coast Journal as a death cap "superbloom." Early fall rains followed by a wet winter and then a round of rain in April kept conditions favorable for the fungus far longer than a typical season, and cases kept appearing into May, past when the outbreak would normally have tapered off. By the end of May, the state had logged 50 reported cases since the previous November, with four deaths and four people needing liver transplants. In an average year, the California Poison Control System sees fewer than five mushroom poisoning reports total.
Humboldt was one of a dozen counties where hospitals treated patients during that stretch, alongside places like Monterey, Sonoma, and the Bay Area. The mushrooms behind most of the serious cases, death cap (Amanita phalloides) and Western Destroying Angel (Amanita ocreata), don't announce themselves. They don't taste bitter. They don't smell wrong. Cooking, boiling, drying, or freezing does nothing to neutralize the toxin. The only real defense is knowing what you're looking at before you eat it, which is a harder task than it sounds when a toxic look-alike can pass for a puffball to someone who has foraged for years.
Local foragers already had reason to know this species has arrived close to home. At the 2025 Mushroom Fair, longtime HBMS member Joann Olson told the North Coast Journal that death cap mushrooms had turned up in Shelter Cove and that her own daughter had collected one from a planter box in Eureka. The fungus is generally described as an import, arriving with landscape plants and slowly working its way up the coast from the Bay Area. It is not confined to deep forest. It grows in the kind of ordinary, in-town soil that sits outside a house.
What the fair is built for
None of this means the Mushroom Fair is a somber event, and Mandy Hackney, HBMS's board president, has been direct about that balance. Responding to the outbreak this spring, she told the North Coast Journal that foraging "has been around as long as humans have and as long as humans are around there's going to be foraging," and that the real answer to the risk is education, not fear. Her advice for anyone heading into the woods this fall is to do the homework before you go out, learn the habitat, the season, and the identifying characteristics of what you're after, and lean on resources like Noah Siegel's book Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast, apps like iNaturalist, and the society itself.
That's more or less what the fair does in physical form. Past events have laid out more than 350 species collected from across Humboldt's habitats, from redwood forest and grassland to dunes and mixed conifer stands, with toxic species displayed right alongside edible ones so visitors can compare them side by side. Siegel spoke at the 2025 fair on his own field experience. HBMS also runs a separate paid workshop through the year taught by Levon Durr, owner of Bayside's Fungaia Farm, and the group holds its regular meetings at the Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Bayside, where members are encouraged to bring mushrooms and questions along with their tea.
A few practical details worth having before the date arrives:
- When: Sunday, November 22, 2026, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Where: Arcata Community Center, 321 Dr. M.L.K. Jr Pkwy
- What to expect: fresh mushroom displays organized by habitat, an identification table where visitors can bring in their own finds or photos, vendor tables, food trucks, and workshops
- Admission: last year's fair charged $10 for adults and $5 for students, seniors, veterans, and kids 7 to 17, with children under 6 free. Check HBMS's events page closer to the date for this year's pricing
HBMS also observes a practice worth mentioning on its own. A few years back, members voted to pay yearly honor payments to the Wiyot, Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, and Wailaki tribes in recognition of the lands where the society collects specimens for the fair.
Where the mushrooms actually are
Most of what ends up on those fair tables comes from somewhere residents already walk. The Arcata Community Forest sits just east of downtown, 2,350 acres of second-growth redwood the city has owned and managed since 1955, making it the first municipally owned forest in California. Trails climb from 250 feet near Redwood Park to just over 1,000 feet at the eastern boundary near Long Loop Trail #17, and the forest shares a Model Forest designation from the Forest Guild with only about 20 other forests nationwide, a list that includes places like Missouri's Pioneer Forest and Maine's Baxter State Park. It is also documented habitat for coho salmon and more than 140 bird species, according to the city's own checklist.
That same ground produces the fall flush of chanterelles, hedgehogs, and dozens of other species that make Humboldt a genuine destination for people who forage seriously, and it is exactly the kind of managed second-growth landscape where a toxic look-alike can share a patch of soil with something perfectly safe to eat. The mushroom that put someone in an out-of-area ICU this past March wasn't picked from some obscure corner of the county. It came out of Six Rivers National Forest, the same kind of public land Humboldt foragers use every fall.
None of this is a reason to skip the season or the fair. It is a reason to treat this November's event less like background scenery and more like the identification check it was built to be, especially in a year when the county has already seen what happens when an experienced eye gets it wrong.
If you're spending your Sundays this fall walking the Community Forest or planning your November around the fair at the Community Center, that's the kind of local rhythm Mike and Marci Pigg like hearing about. Let's Connect if there's ever a Humboldt question, mushroom season or otherwise, we can help answer.
