“Spore Lore” Continues at the Mountain Mushroom Festival

From funnel cakes to gospel groups, sweating through festival season is back in Kentucky.

Under my left arm, there’s a bag of kettle corn the size of a rolled-up sleeping bag, the plastic cling-wrapping to my sickly-Renaissance-child pale skin that hasn’t seen this much sweating and sunshine in, oh, about two years.

With my right hand, I’m tugging a Radio Flyer wagon through a hilly pipeline of booths hocking Ziplocs full of cinnamon candies and jewelry made from bullets, weaving through the throngs of “If You Can Read This, You’re Too Close” and “Baby Yoda Says Relax!” t-shirts. I turn around only briefly (lest I lose my momentum) to catch my three-year-old attempting to feed someone’s prick-eared, too-smart-for-its-own-good German Shepherd a bite of her syrupy blue bubble gum snow cone, which the dog wisely refuses with what appears to be a full-body shudder.

Whipping my head back to its rightful course, I run directly into a gaggle of preteens decked out in pin-personalized Crocs, youth group t-shirts and mesh-backed ballcaps who are banging each other over the head with inflatable plastic hammers. One of the cartoonishly-large tools lightly grazes against my temple as the hormonal pack runs off, a boy wearing wrap-around sunglasses hollering over the din of the crowd, “Let’s go trade this pink hammer for an American Flag version!”

Festival season in Kentucky is back, baby.          

After a couple of years when local festivals patchworked together versions that were some combination of in-person (for better or worse), virtual (a bust, generally) or canceled all together, funnel cake and gospel music enthusiasts alike are chomping at the bit to have fair culture return to their towns. And who can blame them? Festivals are so sizzled into the DNA of counties across Appalachian Kentucky they’re far more than a celebration of wooly worms (Beattyville), poke sallet (Harlan County) or gingerbread (Knott County)—they’re community touchstones linking the past to the present.       

This Saturday at the Mountain Mushroom Festival in downtown Irvine—returning after being on COVID hiatus since 2019—the spongy, spear-shaped (some would say…phallic) morel mushrooms that grow easily around the perimeter of Estill County’s woodsy hills were center stage, with enthusiasts sardined shoulder-to-shoulder as they tried to buy takeout containers full of the dry land fish for $100 per pound. (This is up from an average of $60/pound in 2019. Yikes!)

“He’s been out foraging all night and all morning for these,” a woman sighed in my direction, motioning a loose hand toward her husband who was wheeling-and-dealing morels with all the finesse of an auctioneer.

This year’s festival theme pulls from the motto of the canceled 2020 event—“30 Years of Spore Lore”—but with a twist that screams we’re back, finally: 30 Years of Spore Lore…the Lore Continues.

Over the course of the summer and early fall, we’ll be converting our Friday legislative superlatives into Friday event listings and dispatches from county fairs, cruise-ins and festivals across our region—and we need your help! If you’d like to become a festival correspondent, e-mail thegoldenrodnews@gmail.com and we’ll send along more details about what the job entails. Rates for festival photos start at $50 but will increase if you’d like to tack on interviews, audio or even fair food reviews. We want these to be as immersive as possible! 

The Estill County Child Support Program got into the spirit of the Mountain Mushroom Festival with window painting.

If you’ve ever wanted to adorn your body with morel mushroom-shaped jewelry or use a hand-carved walking stick with a dry land fish decorative top, do I have the goods for you.

This is official festival mascot Morey the Morel. Everyone give Morey a little wave!

Saturday’s super-chunk morel weighed in at a whopping 10 pounds (!) while the mushroom baking competition’s winning cakes were conspicuously not shaped like morels.

Freshly foraged morels were flying out of the coolers and grocery store bags—even at $100/pound.

Look at these beauts!

Come for the pork rinds, stay for the miracles.

The rock, gem and mineral show which runs concurrently with the Mountain Mushroom Festival is a celebration of creek-dwelling Kentucky agate, which is currently the official state rock (even though it is a mineral).

The former high school gymnasium was crammed wall-to-wall with agate hunters and other geode appreciators, happy to be with their community of mineral-minded folks.