Intro to Mushroom Foraging — Eastside A two-hour evening class in Bellevue/Kirkland — no bridge required

Most people who want to forage never start, and it is almost always the same two reasons: they don’t know which mushrooms are actually worth learning, and they are quietly afraid of poisoning themselves. This class fixes both in one evening — and it happens on your side of the water.

We cover the handful of Pacific Northwest mushrooms genuinely worth your time — chanterelles, boletes, morels, hedgehogs, oysters, lobsters — the poisonous species you need to know cold, and the habitat reading that turns “somewhere in the woods” into a specific place you can drive to on Saturday. It is a classroom evening, not a walk, so bring a notebook rather than a basket.

What the Two Hours Cover

• 0:00 Why the Pacific Northwest

  What makes this one of the best foraging regions on earth, how the season runs from spring morels to late-fall hedgehogs, and what is realistically findable within an hour of the Eastside.

• 0:20 The mushrooms worth learning first

  Six or seven species that are common, distinctive, and genuinely good eating. For each one: what it looks like, what it grows with, when it comes up, and the single feature that confirms it.

• 0:50 The dangerous ones

  The species that actually put people in hospital in Washington, the look-alikes they get confused with, and the identification habits that keep you out of trouble. This is the part that lets you forage without anxiety.

• 1:15 Reading habitat

  Tree associations, elevation, moisture, and timing — why a chanterelle is under a hemlock and not a cottonwood. The skill that separates people who find mushrooms from people who go for walks.

• 1:40 Where to go, and questions

  Public land rules, permits, how to pick spots off a map before you drive, what to carry, and how to clean and store what you bring home. Open questions until we run out.

Foraging From the Eastside

The Eastside is arguably the best-placed part of the metro area for this. I-90 puts the Snoqualmie valleys and the North Bend forests inside 30 minutes of Bellevue — that is the closest productive ground to any city in the region, and it stays productive later into the fall than the higher country does. Tiger Mountain and the Issaquah Alps are closer still, and better than most people assume for a weekday evening walk.

Because so much of the good habitat is genuinely close, Eastside foragers tend to get out more often than everyone else, which is exactly how you get good at this. We’ll spend real time on the I-90 corridor specifically.

Who This Is For

About Your Instructor

I’m Jeremy Collison. I’ve spent years foraging the Cascades and the Olympics, I’ve hosted a mushroom identification class from my home that’s rated 4.98 across 122 reviews on Airbnb, and I built Forayz, a mapping tool that foragers across the Pacific Northwest use to find habitat. I teach this the way I wish someone had taught me: fewer species, better understood, with the safety part handled properly rather than waved at.

Other Cities

The same class runs in three other cities this fall. If the Eastside date doesn’t work, one of these might.

There’s also a smaller version of this class hosted at my home in Greenwood, and a four-week fall course at North Seattle College in October. See all mushroom classes.

Ready to Take It Outside?

The class is the classroom half. The other half is standing in the forest with someone pointing at things — that’s what the guided tours are for. The North Bend tours are the natural next step from the Eastside: about 45 minutes from Bellevue, straight down I-90.