Packwood is a small town on the eastern edge of Lewis County, tucked against the western slope of the Cascades, and every October the forest around it does something that most of the country never notices. The rains return, the understory darkens, and the mushrooms come up — chanterelles, boletes, coral fungi, and hundreds of species most people walk past without a second look. For one weekend, a group of neighbors has decided that is worth celebrating.
The Gifford Pinchot Fungi Festival runs October 9 through 11, 2026, hosted by Pinchot Partners and centered at Longmire Springs Brewing, 112 Norman Way in Packwood. It is a three-day gathering devoted to the ecological, culinary, and artistic dimensions of fungi, set in the heart of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. There are guided wild forays into the woods, hands-on workshops, an artisan marketplace, local food, live music, a mushroom costume contest, and a lineup of speakers that includes mycologist and author Daniel Winkler, Alan Rockefeller, Aaron Hilliard, Paul Whitney, Sue Manning, Sarah Richelle Starnes, Tess Barlow, Langdon Cook, Rose Tursi, and others.
Not all of it costs money. The vendor marketplace, live music, kids' activities, and the Saturday costume contest are free and open to the public. Paid tickets — $250 for the full weekend, $125 for a Saturday or Sunday day pass — cover the workshops, the forays (one per person per day), and wellness programming like forest bathing and sound baths. Organizers also offer scholarships, with applications by email, on the stated belief that everyone should have access to fungi education and celebration. Proceeds benefit Pinchot Partners.
The festival is young. Its first edition ran October 24–26, 2025, and it grew out of something smaller and more personal than a typical civic event. Amy Besunder, one of the lead organizers, described the origin this way: "The inspiration for the Gifford Pinchot Fungi Festival grew from a small group of women who share a deep passion for fungi and the unique ecosystem of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. We came together with a vision to highlight this wonderful resource not only as a seasonal food, but also as a symbol of resilience, regeneration, and connection. Our all-female, all-volunteer committee is dedicated to bringing this vision to life."
That first year, the festival reached beyond the forest. The Mountain View and Packwood Timberland Libraries joined in with mushroom-themed storytimes they called "Sporeytime," pairing picture books about mushrooms with a hands-on craft for young mycophiles. Families could pick up kid-friendly Mushroom Bingo cards at either library or at festival registration at Longmire Springs, take them along on weekend forays, and return them afterward for a sticker. It was a small gesture, and a telling one: the festival was designed from the start to be something a family could walk into without a ticket or a background in mycology.
The choice of host matters too. Longmire Springs Brewing sits at the address listed for the festival, and it functions as the weekend's social anchor. The 2026 edition opens there with a glow-in-the-dark paint-and-sip on Thursday, October 8, followed by a Friday night dance party with DJ Zephr spinning hip-hop, R&B, house, jungle, and soul — free and open to all. Saturday brings the bluegrass Grateful Dead tribute Deadgrass, then the costume contest at 7:30 p.m., with prizes for Best Young Forager, Best in Show, and Most Creative Fungus. The instruction is simple: dress as your favorite fungus and strut your spores.
Behind the celebration is an organization with a more serious mandate. Pinchot Partners has spent more than twenty years providing what it describes as a safe and open forum for people with diverse — often conflicting — views and values to collaborate on restoration projects in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Working within the Cowlitz Valley Ranger District, the group identifies "Zones of Agreement" and distills those into recommendations for the U.S. Forest Service. Its partners include the Forest Service, the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, Cascade Forest Conservancy, timber industry representatives, and the Washington Department of Natural Resources. The stated mission is to promote watershed health, create quality local jobs, and encourage sustainable recreation.
The group's own framing is blunt about what it was up against: by "working on common ground," Pinchot Partners helped end the costly stalemates that had plagued forestry work and devastated rural communities since the 1990s. Its project list reads like a catalog of the unglamorous work that keeps a forest functioning — huckleberry restoration and monitoring, an in-stream wood bank pilot program, stabilizing roads to reduce runoff, improving culverts for habitat, thinning overgrown plantation stands. The organization also relies on consensus building rather than Robert's Rules for its hardest decisions, a detail that says something about how it prefers to operate.
That is the context in which a mushroom festival makes a particular kind of sense. Fungi are the forest's quiet infrastructure — decomposers, symbionts, the connective tissue beneath the soil that lets trees trade nutrients and communicate. A weekend spent learning their names and roles is, in its way, an education in the same thing Pinchot Partners has been practicing above ground for two decades: the value of things that hold a system together without announcing themselves.
For visitors, the festival is also an argument for staying a while. Events and activities unfold across all three days, and organizers point out that Packwood offers cabins, lodges, and vacation rentals as a base between sessions. Fall in the area brings crisp air, colorful forests, and quiet evenings — conditions that suit a festival built around being outdoors. Booking ahead is advised.
The name on the festival belongs to Gifford Pinchot, the forester and politician who became the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service and a pioneer of American conservation, and whose name the surrounding national forest carries. It is a weighty name for a weekend that includes a costume contest and a dance party. But the pairing is not as odd as it looks. Pinchot's argument was always that a forest is worth using and worth keeping, and that those two things need not be enemies. In Packwood, in October, with the mushrooms coming up and a small all-volunteer committee handing out bingo cards, that argument is still being made — one foray at a time.