Kamilche, in Washington State, is presented as both Paul Stamets’s home and a working landscape shaped by his mycology. At Little Skookum Inlet, a house funded by a fungal patent stood near the laboratories and grow rooms of Fungi Perfecti. A visiting writer’s weekend there brought together conversations about Psilocybin, a tour of the company’s facilities, and walks in the surrounding woods and shoreline; it also reopened Stamets’s interest in discussing this part of his life as university research revived.

Home on Little Skookum Inlet

At the time of the visit, Stamets shared a new house on Little Skookum Inlet with his partner, Dusty Yao, and their dogs, Plato and Sophie. Built with clear Douglas fir and cedar, the house reflected his attachment to trees and wood. The setting was not simply a private retreat: the surrounding forest, shoreline, and nearby company grounds formed part of the environment in which he worked and talked about fungi.

The visit unfolded over a weekend. The writer arrived on Friday, with a campsite reservation not until Sunday evening, leaving time for extended conversation about Psilocybe mushrooms, meals featuring other kinds of mushrooms, and a tour of Fungi Perfecti. Stamets and the visitor also walked in the nearby woods and along the shore with the dogs. On Sunday morning they drove south toward the Oregon border to look for Psilocybe azurescens. In Kamilche, discussion and fieldwork were closely connected: the visit moved from the home and laboratory into the landscape where fungi could be sought and studied.

The house and the carpenter-ant solution

Stamets called the house one that mushrooms had built. It replaced an old farmhouse on the site that had been badly affected by carpenter ants. He knew that a species of Cordyceps could eliminate an ant colony, but the ants’ defenses made a straightforward application ineffective: returning ants were inspected for spores, and those found carrying them were removed from the colony.

To circumvent that defense, Stamets bred a mutant Cordyceps-like fungus that delayed sporulation. He placed some of its mycelium in a bowl from his daughter’s dollhouse and left it on the kitchen floor. The ants carried the material into their nest, apparently treating it as food; the fungus sporulated only after reaching the colony. The farmhouse could not be saved, but the proceeds from Stamets’s patent on the fungus helped pay for the new house. The account makes the home itself a record of applied mycology: a research problem, an engineered solution, a patent, and a building financed by the result.

Fungi Perfecti and renewed research

A short walk through the evergreen forest from Stamets’s home, Fungi Perfecti occupied a group of long metal buildings. Some contained grow rooms for medicinal and edible fungi; others housed research facilities, including clean rooms and laminar-flow chambers used to reproduce fungi from tissue culture and conduct experiments. Framed patents on the office walls stood alongside the practical work. The tour gave the writer concrete evidence that Stamets was not only an expansive speaker but also a researcher and entrepreneur applying fungi in medicine, environmental restoration, agriculture, forestry, and national defense.

Kamilche was also where Stamets proved willing to discuss Psilocybin with the visiting writer. He remained keenly interested in the subject and had consulted with the Johns Hopkins University team when it was seeking a source of Psilocybin. Stamets was also updating his 1996 field guide. When the writer used a slang term for Psilocybin, Stamets objected emphatically, and the term was not used again. The exchange captured both his openness about the renewed research and his insistence on the terms in which the subject should be discussed. Kamilche thus links the domestic and practical dimensions of his work with a wider revival of formal psychedelic research.