In the 1980s, if you wanted to talk openly about psychedelics, there was one primary place Colorado you could do so: Telluride.
At the time, drugs like psilocybin and LSD were newly illegal due to the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Richard Nixon’s subsequent War on Drugs made psychedelics a taboo topic in the prevailing culture, even if they had piqued the interest of medical professionals for decades prior.
One such enthusiast was a respected Denver radiologist named Manny Salzman. Though he was an expert on mushroom poisonings, Salzman was always interested in the psychoactive varieties and how they, too, might be a form of medicine.
In the late 1970s, Salzman hosted mushroom conferences in Aspen where doctors could come to learn about toxicity and poisoning. He later moved his conference to Gothic, near Crested Butte, and Telluride, which was then a sort of hippie enclave. Accounts vary as to why – openly discussing psychedelics was frowned upon in many places and may have led to the event’s migration, some say – but in Telluride he enlisted a few locals to help him throw a gathering of like minds, one that still exists today.
In 1981, the first Telluride Mushroom Conference – which would eventually become the Telluride Mushroom Festival – convened enthusiasts, experts, foragers and scientific renegades to hunt for wild mushrooms and talk about mind-altering substances. The lineup featured some of the foremost thinkers in the space, including mycologists Paul Stamets and Gary Lincoff, and Dr. Andrew Weil.
“The conference was a bunch of dissidents who wanted to talk about all aspects of mushrooms, not just toxins or identification. It was beyond just the mycology,” said Art Goodtimes, one of the co-founders. “It was the only real drug conference and discussion that was public that I knew about in the country. It was masquerading almost as a mushroom conference.”
Telluride Mushroom Festival celebrates its 45th annual event this year, from Aug. 13 to 17, and though it has evolved from its humble beginnings, it still remains true to its roots in many ways.
John Sir Jesse, another co-founder, recalls those early years lugging a green canvas military tent to Town Park so that everyone had a place to meet and share what they found foraging throughout the San Juan Mountains. Back then, attendees would meet for breakfast before venturing out into the woods and later meet back up for dinner, when they cooked up all the edible, non-psychedelic mushrooms they found. (Sir Jesse said he’s only found a single psilocybin mushroom in the wild near Telluride and that did not get served with a dinner.)
Today, one of the hallmarks of the festival remains guided forays, in which attendees join an expert guide to collect mushrooms and bring them back to an identification tent. The fest has swapped the green canvas tent for a white one and it’s now set up at Elks Park, in the middle of downtown. There are also still opportunities for festivalgoers to dine together and enjoy various preparations of coveted wild fungi, though they are ancillary events at hosted private residences throughout town.
As mushrooms and all their various uses in food, myco-materials, environmental cleanup and mental health have gained prominence in popular culture, Telluride Mushroom Festival has attracted more people. What started as a gathering of 40 people in 1981 has exploded to “by far, the largest wild mushroom event in North America,” according to mycologist and festival co-director Britt Bunyard. Each summer, it welcomes an estimated 3,000 attendees.
Part of the draw is the setting. Telluride is, no doubt, an exceptional place for any kind of festival because of show-stopping terrain and beauty. But the unique environment also makes it a fantastic place to scout for mushrooms, Bunyard said.
Where other places see mushrooms flourish for many months, Telluride has a short window when they thrive, meaning chanterelles, boletes, morels and many other varieties all pop up simultaneously.
“It’s a really unique situation where it’s this compacted, compressed season and that makes it great,” Bunyard said
As the festival has grown, so too has the programming. Back in the day, you could attend every scheduled lecture, said Sir Jesse. Now with hundreds of events and attractions over five days, that would be impossible.
The 2025 lineup includes expert speakers discussing mushroom taxonomy, cultivation, conservation, health benefits and specific varieties, like truffles and cordyceps. There are also yoga classes, concerts, networking events, book signings, workshops, happy hours and even kid-friendly programming. Many of those free to attend including the fest’s signature parade, in which people dressed as mushrooms dance down Colorado Avenue. It’s been a beloved tradition for more than two decades, Goodtimes said.
Psychedelics have been a recurring theme throughout the event’s 45-year history and in that respect, it was ahead of its time. Psychedelic mushrooms and other drugs were forbidden topics of discussion in both academic and amateur mycology circles because of the attached stigma, Bunyard said. In the early decades, Telluride Mushroom Festival attracted a niche cohort of people willing to push the boundaries of what was scientifically acceptable.
“It was just sort of a career killer,” Bunyard said. “It’s just always been a very taboo subject and the scientists who were studying it were not taken seriously.”
That has changed in recent years, as research into substances like psilocybin, acid and MDMA has seen a resurgence. Some of the most notable names on mushroom fest bill this year are there to talk about psychedelics.
This year, researcher Dennis McKenna – also the brother of counterculture icon Terence McKenna – will host numerous discussions on the subject, including “psilocybin and the origin of consciousness” and “natural psychedelics and symbiotic rights.” Stamets, always a crowd favorite, will also offer a keynote lecture on how psilocybin mushrooms can save the world.
Additional trippy topics include religious freedom and psychedelics; what decriminalization means for Colorado; and lessons learned from the first three months of the state’s legal psilocybin therapy program.
Salzman died in 2018, the year before Denver became the first city in the U.S. to decriminalize psilocybin. Now that “magic mushrooms” and other psychedelics are not only decriminalized, but becoming legalized here is a testament to Salzman’s original mission, Goodtimes said.
“We were talking about a lot of these things and trying to figure out where they fit into society,” Goodtimes said. “Dr. Salzman, I think he understood that necessity of healing the mind as well as the body. Now we’re seeing validation of that vision and we see it exploding.”
The 45th annual Telluride Mushroom Festival takes place Aug. 13-17 at numerous venues. Find tickets and more information at tellurideinstitute.org/telluride-mushroom-festival.