The Telluride Mushroom Festival has been a staple of the town’s summer season for more than 45 years. But how many more will it stick around? That is the question organizers have been grappling with after a significant decline in ticket sales in 2026 put its future in peril.
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From Aug. 12 to 16, mycology enthusiasts from around the world will gather in Telluride to talk about all things mushrooms, including psychedelics, and go foraging in the woods. The festival is billed as the largest of its kind in North America, welcoming an estimated 3,000 attendees each year.
Continued growth in attendance has enabled the Telluride Mushroom Festival to expand its programming. While scientific lectures and panels are still core to the lineup, the schedule now boasts yoga classes, outdoor cooking demonstrations, high-end chef dinners, concerts, film screenings, and even kids forays and workshops.
With expansion, however, comes additional operating costs. Those have largely been offset by ticket sales and sponsorships, said festival executive officer Ashley Coady Smith — until this year. Since March, ticket sales are down 40% compared to 2025 when the festival sold out, she said, forcing organizers to change their approach.
Since June, Coady Smith and her team have been soliciting donors to bridge the gap in this year’s festival operating budget. Now, they are launching the TMF Future Fund in hopes of raising an additional $100,000 safety net and building a mycelial network of passionate members to help sustain the event.
Of that $100,000, half will be invested in planning the 2027 festival and half will be kept on hand as “a minimum operating reserve” to ensure the festival does not cease to exist, Coady Smith said.
“This year has been an incredible challenge for the books,” she said. “I suppose if all fundraising and sales stopped today, yes, we’d be at a very big risk of that, but I’m staying completely optimistic.”
More broadly, the fund is a strategic move away from ticket sales as the festival’s primary revenue source, said programming director Britt Bunyard. While that has worked for many decades, pricey entry fees can be a hard sell to a community of folks who often look for free food growing in the forest. Host organization The Telluride Institute is a nonprofit, so Bunyard is now thinking about fundraising for the festival like an arts institution.
“We sort of need to change how we operate and be more like other, not necessarily mushroom-related events, but museums and music festivals and concert halls,” Bunyard said. “They rely on ticket sales, but when you look at what’s really paying the bills, it’s a lot of big-time donors.”
Members can support for as little as $100 in the fund’s inaugural year and, in return, lock in perks like discounts on future festival tickets and merch. Organizers are also looking for someone to contribute $25,000 to secure a matching donation from The Humboldt Foundation, which supports groups that advance “the diffusion of sovereignty,” including ecological stewardship, the website says.
In addition to the future fund, Telluride Mushroom Festival is exploring other creative avenues to bolster ticket sales. For example, it is offering camping for the first time ever and selling single-day tickets as cheaper alternatives to the $480 full festival pass.
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The vast majority of Telluride Mushroom Festival attendees come from Colorado, with a sizable portion making the trek from Denver. Coady Smith hopes the opportunity to camp, especially, will inspire last-minute ticket buyers in the state who can now get lodging for a fraction of the cost of an Airbnb. (Camping costs $300 for six nights, before taxes and fees.)
The consumer costs associated with visiting Telluride were a concern for Bunyard even before the pandemic. But since then, it seems the prices of everything have skyrocketed, from food to gas to hotels. While that’s true elsewhere around the country, Telluride is famously one of the most expensive places in Colorado.
The ethos behind foraging wild mushrooms is one of finding free resources, something of an added challenge when trying to sell tickets, Bunyard said.
“You have all these people coming wanting to get stuff very cheap or free, or learn how to do that, but you’re also holding it in one of the most expensive places in North America. So there’s this weird scenario where it’s going to cost a lot of money to do all this free stuff,” he said. “A lot of people that have been long-time members of the festival I think get that and they’re starting to respond with our pleas for them to step up and become a sustaining donor.”
Over the years, Telluride Mushroom Festival has tried to lower the barriers to entry for would-be attendees and locals with free activities at the local library and in Elks Park downtown. About 30% of programming does not require a ticket, Coady Smith said. That includes the Saturday afternoon parade down Colorado Avenue, a beloved tradition that sees people dressed as different flavors of fungi dancing down the street.
The challenges facing Telluride Mushroom Festival are not unique, according to Coady Smith. Following a post-pandemic boom, other events have also experienced declining ticket sales, possibly signaling a change in the local marketplace. That recently inspired organizers from many major events, including the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and the Telluride Blues and Brews Festival, to establish a so-called “festival alliance” that is actively working to bring more visitors to town.
“It seems like a lot of what’s happening is this shift to a luxury traveler and destination wedding kind of environment,” said Coady Smith. “We’re all working together to help work with the town and work with the tourism board and work with our lodging partners, trying to figure out how to keep festivals part of Telluride’s fabric. Because it’s been part of the fabric for so long and it’s so important to so many people.”
More information about the TMF Future Fund is expected to be published on the festival website soon, Coady Smith said. In the meantime, people who are interested in donating can do so at tellurideinstitute.org/telluride-mushroom-festival/support-us. Organizers will also be fundraising in-person during the event next week. Tickets to attend are for sale at tellurideinstitute.org/passes-telluride-mushroom-festival.
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