Little Skookum Inlet is the setting of Paul Stamets’s home in Washington State and the starting point for the narrator’s visit to learn about mushrooms. The inlet anchors a portrait of Stamets’s life among trees, dogs, and fungi, and provides a domestic base for conversations and excursions before the journey south to seek Psilocybe azurescens at the mouth of the Columbia River.

Home and Setting

At the time of the visit, Stamets lived with his partner, Dusty Yao, and their two large dogs, Plato and Sophie, in a sprawling new house on Little Skookum Inlet. The house was built inside and out from clear Douglas fir and cedar, giving the residence a close material connection to the surrounding woodland. Stamets’s attachment to trees and wood was not merely decorative: his work and interests, like the construction of the house, were bound up with fungi and the life of forests.

The visit unfolded over a weekend. The campsite reservation was not until Sunday night, leaving time to talk about Psilocybes, eat other kinds of mushrooms, tour the Fungi Perfecti facilities, and walk through nearby woods and along the shoreline with the dogs. The inlet thus served as more than a place-name or scenic backdrop: it was the home setting from which the narrator encountered Stamets’s work and the landscape around it.

The Farmhouse and the Fungal Solution

The new house stood on the site of a rickety farmhouse that had been slowly succumbing to a carpenter-ant infestation when Stamets moved in. He developed a mycological solution, using a mutant Cordyceps-like fungus whose sporulation was delayed. The ants ordinarily inspected returning members for Cordyceps spores and removed those carrying them; by postponing sporulation, Stamets’s fungus evaded that defense.

He placed some of its mycelium in his daughter’s dollhouse bowl and left it on the kitchen floor. During the night, ants carried the material into their nest, mistaking it for a safe food source. Once the fungus sporulated inside the colony, it overcame the ants’ defenses. The farmhouse could not be saved, but the proceeds from the patent on the fungus enabled Stamets to build the larger house on the inlet. The residence therefore records a specific chain of consequences: an infestation prompted an experiment, the experiment produced a patent, and the patent helped finance the home that replaced the damaged farmhouse.

Base for a Mushroom Hunt

Before the visit, the narrator studied Stamets’s field guide in preparation for a search for Psilocybe mushrooms. Stamets had explained that most of the season’s mushrooms had already appeared, but suggested a trip just after Thanksgiving if the weather was right. He identified the mouth of the Columbia River as the only place where Psilocybe azurescens had been consistently found and advised the narrator to book a yurt at a nearby park, without using his name.

Little Skookum Inlet was the starting point, not the site of that hunt. On Sunday morning, after the weekend at the house, the pair drove south toward the Oregon border. This distinction gives the inlet its narrative role: it is a place of preparation and sustained contact with Stamets’s mycological world, while the anticipated search for azurescens belongs to a different location.