Washington State enters the account through two linked places: Paul Stamets’s home at Little Skookum Inlet, where a conversation reopens his connection to psilocybin mushrooms, and an unnamed public park near the mouth of the Columbia River, where he takes the narrator hunting for Psilocybe azurescens. The state is not presented as a general portrait; it is a setting of private expertise and public restriction, where a rare-mushroom search must be conducted without revealing its precise location.

Stamets’s Home at Little Skookum Inlet

The narrator reaches Stamets at his home in Kamilche, Washington State, expecting that his public standing might make him reluctant to discuss psilocybin mushrooms. Instead, Stamets is forthcoming. Their long conversation makes clear that the subject remains important to him, and that the revival of university research has made him more comfortable revisiting this part of his life. He has also consulted with the Johns Hopkins University team when they were seeking a source of psilocybin and is updating his 1996 field guide.

The exchange also establishes how carefully Stamets draws boundaries around mushroom language. When the narrator casually uses a slang term for psilocybin, Stamets objects gravely; the narrator does not use the word again. The moment gives the home conversation a practical consequence: access to Stamets’s knowledge depends not only on shared interest but on respecting his preferences.

Stamets invites the narrator to visit his place on Little Skookum Inlet, at the base of the Olympic Peninsula. Asked whether the trip could coincide with the fruiting season, he explains that most Psilocybe mushrooms have already come and gone. If the narrator comes just after Thanksgiving and the weather cooperates, however, he can be taken to the place where Psilocybe azurescens has, according to Stamets, been consistently found: the mouth of the Columbia River. He names the park where he has found the mushrooms before, recommends booking a yurt, and advises the narrator not to use his name.

The Columbia River Excursion

In the first week of December, the party drives west toward the Pacific coast and then south toward the Columbia River, stopping in Long Beach for lunch and camping supplies. The exact park remains undisclosed at Stamets’s request. He identifies three public parks bordering the river’s broad mouth—Fort Stevens, Cape Disappointment, and Lewis and Clark National Historical Park—and says only that they stay at one of them. The withheld name is part of the account’s geography: the destination is situated precisely enough to understand its coastal setting, but not precisely enough to expose the hunting spot.

Stamets has hunted there for years, yet worries that a ranger might recognize him. He stays in the car while the narrator checks in at the park office and collects a map directing them to their yurt. Once their gear is unloaded and stowed, they lace up their boots and search the scrub near the sand dunes and the grassy areas beside the yurts, walking with their eyes lowered. The narrator describes their posture as the psilocybin stoop, interrupted whenever an approaching car makes them look up.

A Landscape of Permission and Risk

The search takes place in a setting where access does not mean permission. Mushroom foraging is prohibited in most state parks, and possession of psilocybin mushrooms is a crime under both state and federal law. The excursion therefore combines field knowledge with caution: Stamets’s years of experience guide the hunt, while the possibility of recognition and the legal status of the mushrooms shape how openly the party can move.

The December conditions are mild by local standards: the sky is overcast, the temperature is in the high forties, and the park is nearly empty. The coast appears as a stark, wind-shaped landscape, with low angular pines, level sandy beaches, and large storm-tossed timbers scattered along the shore. Some of the logs have floated down the Columbia from old-growth forests hundreds of miles upriver. In this scene, the river links the concealed hunting ground to a much larger landscape, while the park’s quietness offers both solitude and no assurance of safety.