My favorite amateur mushroom hunter is Alan Rockefeller, who I found out about through his fantastic talks on identifying psilocybin mushrooms: [1] [2] He talk

My favorite amateur mushroom hunter is Alan Rockefeller, who I found out about through his fantastic talks on identifying psilocybin mushrooms: [1] [2] He talks about how he got in to mushroom hunting at about 18 minutes in to [1]: "About 2001 I went hiking, and I've always been in to nature and camping but around 2001 I was hiking and I kind of felt like it was sort of a waste of time to hike. Sure, it was exercise and it was pretty out there, but I was kind of like "What am I doing with my life?", but I saw all these mushrooms, and I'm like "Huh.. these are pretty interesting," and so I looked at them a little closer and thought "there must be people out there that know what these are, that know which ones are common, which ones are hallucinogenic, poisonous," and so I just started paying a little bit of attention to them and taking pictures of them and that gave me a reason to go out in to the woods, so I didn't feel nearly so guilty for wasting all my time in the forest anymore, since I had a mission. "These days my mission is usually to take the best pictures I possibly can of every species of mushroom I come across and then I publish all the pictures online with a free license so anybody can use them forever. I do DNA sequencing of all of them and get them all in to genbank. But I think the path was just being really curious about them and just being really curious about nature and doing that. I never really expected to get well known for psilocybin mushrooms. That was kind of random. I just got really in to them at the same time they got kind of popular. "I think psilocybin mushrooms are really useful for getting people interested in nature. So many people out there looking for psilocybin mushrooms. This gets them outside, gets them looking closely at the mushrooms. There are so many people looking for psilocybin mushrooms to get high and now they're super in to plants and mushrooms and all of nature. It's kind of like a gateway in to nature." [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pInqVRRva7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pInqVRRva7M [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcL-7u80kjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcL-7u80kjs