The Humongous Fungus: Crystal Falls' giant underground neighbor

In the hardwood forest near Crystal Falls lives a neighbor most towns would envy: one single living organism so old and so vast that it made headlines around the world. It’s a fungus — a honey mushroom called Armillaria — and almost all of it lives underground, a web of root-like threads spreading silently through the soil. What you might spot on the surface in autumn is just clusters of ordinary little mushrooms; the real creature is the giant network beneath, all of it genetically one individual.

When University of Toronto scientists mapped it in 1992, they found it covered about 37 acres, weighed something like a hundred tons, and was roughly 1,500 years old — and they declared it one of the largest and oldest living things ever measured. Journalists dubbed it the “humongous fungus,” and the name stuck. The discovery set off a worldwide hunt for bigger ones, and bigger ones did turn up — an Armillaria in Oregon now holds the world title — but Crystal Falls had it first, and a return study a few years ago suggested the local giant is even bigger and older than anyone thought, maybe 2,500 years old. It doesn’t harm people, and it mostly just quietly eats deadwood.

So Crystal Falls does the only sensible thing: it throws a party. Every August the town celebrates the Humongous Fungus Fest, a cheerful small-town festival — music, food, and in some years a mushroom pizza built to ridiculous proportions — all in honor of the enormous, ancient, entirely benevolent mushroom living next door. You can’t visit the fungus itself (it’s spread through private and public forest, mostly invisible), but you can absolutely visit the festival.