Gulf South Mycological Society
2022 Winter Foray
The GSMS 2022 Winter Foray is a great time to meet others along the gulf coast.
Please lets us know your interests in attending by registering here on the BRMS site. Its our way of gauging interest and informing you of other in the Baton Rouge area that are going.
Registration at the Gulf South Mycological Society's website is required to attend. The cost is $35.00.
My Dear Fellow Mycophiles!
I write to you with a guilty conscience for not having communicated with you sooner about the details of the upcoming Winter Foray, which will again be held in Alexandria, Louisiana at the Best Western, this time from Dec 2 to Dec 4. My sincere apologies for my negligence. It's been an exceptionally busy and chaotic couple months for me, and not wanting to get lost in the weeds, I'll just leave it at that. In any event, the foray is happening, and as our speaker and guest mycologist list grows, it promises to be an exceptional one, potentially even an unprecedented one. More on that in a moment.
I want to extend a warm, if belated, welcome to our new members, many of whom have joined in the last month or so. We are thrilled that you have elected to join our club and are confident that you will find in our club the mycological knowledge that may initially have motivated you to seek us out, as well as a wonderful, diverse, and vibrant community of mycophiles. I look forward to meeting you all and highly encourage you to consider attending the Winter Foray, which is always an exciting event, with lots of fungi, great fellowship, good food, and (most of the time) the perfect mild weather for being in the stunning woods of Kisatchie National Forest. Our forays, which are weekend long events, occur twice a year, once in the winter and once in the summer, and are generally the only events that bring members from across the Gulf South. Our day walks tend to be more localized and fragmented (understandably). In short, this is an opportunity to meet and enjoy the company of members of our club whom you may not see until next summer or next winter.
Now on to the specifics: We have assembled a team of mycological all-stars to serve as our speakers and guest mycologists. It should go without saying that our scientific advisors - David Lewis (President Emeritus), Jay Justice, Clark Ovrebo, and Juan Mata - occupy that same elite space as our guests. Many clubs lack the scientific and experiential backbone that makes our club so special. Our scientific advisors are being touted right now in emails like this one, as they are frequently invited speakers and guest mycologists for other clubs. That said, in addition to our already exceptionally strong bullpen, we will be adding the renowned French mycologist Bart Buyck, whose scholarly accomplishments are far-reaching and many, and Django Grootmyers, a graduate student at the prestigious Matheny Lab. As one of the most skilled taxonomists in the US, Django is precisely that guy who can bring order and appropriate binomials to that end of the display table where the unknown and frequently unidentifable collections accumulate. Dr Buyck and Django are essentially headlining our event and will speak on Saturday and Friday respectively. In addition to our speakers, we were lucky to land two additional mycologists, each of whom has developed renown over the years. Danny Newman will be joining us, and for those of you who are familiar with MushroomObserver.org, you no doubt know Danny as one of a handful of sages who together make that site such a rich and varied repository of myco-knowledge. He is an excellent taxonomist, a patient and generous teacher, and just a good person to have around at events like these. He knows his stuff, to put it mildly. Our biggest surprise was the late addition of Alan Rockefeller, whom many of you likely know as an expert in the genus Psilocybe. I think it's mistake and a bit short-sighted to merely pin down Alan as the Psilocybe expert (though he is certainly that). He also is accomplished in phylogenetics, is exceptional at microscopy (a skill we hope he can pass along to some of us), and is well known for his photography.
I want to emphasize this point because it's an important one, one that indicates how special our club is: both Danny and Alan reached out to us in the hopes that they could attend our event. Typically it's the other way around - typically, our sister clubs across the country are throwing money at them and begging them to attend their events. (And understandably so: they're authorities in their fields and have tons to offer.) We attract mycologists of this caliber because of our history, because of our exceptionally strong group of scientific advisors, because of our emphasis both on the science of mycology and the practice of foraging and collecting, and also because of the fungal biodiversity that we are so lucky to have in the Gulf South. I wanted to share that with you all, as I thought it was pretty cool that we ended up with such an embarrassment of riches. I think we owe David and Jay some gratitude for helping to assemble such an excellent team.
This email will be followed shortly by another one. I'm working out the contract with Best Western and will have registration forms ready once we hammer out a deal. I'll also have a newsletter.
I hope you are all well. May we get lots of rain this month!
Warmly,
Logan
Logan Wiedenfeld
President / Gulf South Mycological Society
1213 National St
Vicksburg, MS 39180
(832) 316-0038
