Location
Amanitas are usually found near birch and spruce trees, but can also be located around beech trees as well. From my own experience, they don't necessarily always grow directly under trees, but often also a short distance away from the tree. The reason amanita muscaria grows around these types of trees, is because they have a symbiosis with each other, where they exchange nutrients that benefit both the tree and the mushroom. Another tip when trying to locate these mushrooms is to find places with green grass. I have yet to find one that didn't grow on green grass. Whereas I've been in forests that had bare soil with leaves on the ground, and in said forest we didn't find a single amanita muscaria. So from my experience, don't waste your time looking in forests without fresh grass.
When you spot a single amanita, look around for others nearby, because you can often be lucky to find a lot more right next to it.

Collecting
When you're collecting the mushrooms, make sure to have some sort of bag with you (An ordinary plastic bag will suffice). The mushrooms crumble easily and they can be very delicate, so be careful when handling them. Depending on the method you want to consume the mushrooms, you should choose how much of the stem that you can be bothered taking with you. If you are looking to eat the mushrooms, I would advice you to try get as much of the stem with you, because the active chemicals are found throughout the whole mushroom. If you on the other hand prefer to smoke the mushroom, you don't need the stem, and can suffice with only collecting the caps.

Chemicals
Amanita Muscaria contains 2 primary chemicals. Muscimol and ibotenic acid.
Muscimol is the active ingredient in the mushroom and is for the most part the chemical that people look for when collecting these mushrooms.
Ibotenic Acid on the other hand is a neurotoxin. The red variety of amanita muscaria are less likely to cause help problems than its white and brown cousins. So it's a bad idea to play around with the other varieties of this mushroom. As a rule of thumb, you need to eat about 15 raw amanita muscaria caps before the dose becomes life threatening.
The good thing about ibotenic acid is that it converts into muscimol when reaching certain tempratures or dried out, but I will talk about this later.

Drying (Eating method)
When you get home with the mushrooms, you have different choices to make depending on the method of consumption.

If you want to eat the mushrooms, you need to find some newspapers or a cloth. You will then proceed to place the mushrooms on either of those.
You can also choose to chop the shrooms into smaller pieces, which increases the drying process.
Place the mushrooms in a dark and dry area, and especially not in direct sunlight.
To increase the drying even further, you can have a fan blow on the mushrooms for as long as possible.
The process can very well take a few weeks.

Another method that is a lot faster is to place the mushrooms in the oven at 65-75 degrees celcius, until completely dried out.

Drying (Smoking method)
The smoking method requires you to peel off all the red skin along with the orange goo underneath using a knife. It can be a little difficult at first, but if you cut the cap in halves or quarters, it becomes easier. You may also find it easier to simply carve out the gills, which leaves the skin intact.
Once you've seperated the skin from the gills, you can proceed to find a pan.
Place the skin on the pan, with the red color facing upwards and the orange goo downwards.
As with the oven method, you need to turn up the heat to about 65-75 degrees celcius. Now you can really just leave it there to finish up for you, but you should check up on them every now and then for safety reasons. Once you do check to them, you may notice that some of the pieces have gotten an air bubble. Simply take a fork or something similar to push it down, so that the middle also gets dried out, and not only the sides.



Consumption (Eating method)
Once your mushrooms have either dried out naturally or in the oven, you can go ahead and eat them safely.
You can also have a bit more fun and make various edibles containing the mushrooms, just make sure the temperature required to make the edibles does not exceed 75 degrees celcius.
You can also make tea out of the mushrooms if that is what you prefer.

Consumption (Smoking method)
Once the mushroom skin has dried off completely, you can go ahead and grind it up. Proceed to roll it up in a normal cone as you would with any other joint containing weed instead. You may want to add some tobacco, weed or some other herb that makes it a little easier to light up your mushroom joint. But you can also smoke pure mushroom material, if you want to.



Effects
The effects you get from amanita muscaria can vary a lot. Some people experience similarities with being very very drunk. Others simply fall asleep and report that they see everything in new ways when they wake back up. I've even heard of people that had deep spiritual experiences on these mushrooms. And I have read of reports where people get an immense amount of energy and euphoria, along with a need to keep running.
The experiences are very different to each other, which just makes these mushrooms even more exciting, as you never know exactly what you may end up with.
But I will suggest that you read more on erowid http://www.erowid.org/ex...nces/subs/e...itas.shtml

Note that many bad experiences where people get really sick and stuff, is often caused by the ibotenic acid that they either didn't cook or dry out of the mushrooms. But if you follow the steps I have provided, the ibotenic acid will be converted to muscimol, and there should be no health risks.

Word of Advice
You can never read enough about whatever drug you are planning to consume, and you shouldn't stick with this guide only, to help you through your amanita muscaria journey.

Good luck with the mushies.

if you don't mind me asking, what is the reasoning behind this?

it's just that the ancient vedic preparation of the soma included sun-drying (in fact, they seemed to consider it a vital part of the process), and UV light is said to convert ibotenic acid to muscazone.

From what I've read, it decreases the potency of the mushrooms.

i would say it is the opposite from my experience.. if eliyahu were still here i think he would agree (apparently sun-dried were the only ones potent enough for him to notice, iirc - though he was mostly doing low doses in conjunction with DMT)

but if you want you can dry them as dry as you normally and THEN expose to UV light (if you are afraid you might convert some ibotenic that might have been muscimol to muscazone instead).


also i recommend getting baby amanitas while you can (still covered with the veil is preferable), its a lot more convenient to just pop a button-sized cap or two than eat two very large caps without as much veil (and thus less potent).
of course, it's recommended you let at least one amanita in each spot reach sporulation, for obvious reasons. tho the mycelium underground can still possibly fruit without spores, there is a drastically noticeable difference (the mushrooms do produce spores - for a reason no doubt).

Oh man! I've been looking for these guys everywhere! I heard they like pine trees, but then I started noticing there's barely any pine trees where I live.

Thanks for this thread! Do you suppose there's still some around to find?

its probably too late this year (try late july-early august for the first ones) - though things may be different where you live (i haven't found any amanitas after november [and those are pretty rare] up here in alaska

up where i live its almost all spruce and birch. i have read that amanitas only grow on conifers, but i have only really seen them on birch which is deciduous (every now and then they will be on a coniferous spruce, but they seem to prefer birch without question).

they can be very hard to spot when small (especially when they're under their all-white veil) and still can be difficult to spot when large (which is surprising for a vibrant crimson fruit) but they are incredibly easy to identify.

best of luck to you and happy hunting next year!

Yeah, I live in Washington, so maybe they are out a bit longer here. I'll have some time soon. If nothing else, it's nice to get out for a walk!

I have read a bunch on how to identify them, and am a seasoned hunter of the psilocybe type, so I feel confident in my id'ing skills.

We do have spruce and birch here, so that's where I'll go.

Thanks!!

Keep your eyes peeled for different colors from yellow, golden, and peach to red as there are several varieties. The ones I have found were never quite red but more peach and golden. One tip for id'ing is to pull the entire base of the mushroom out of the ground and the very bottom it should be bul-bous. There is some debate as to how to classify the peach strain and there are some conflicting names for it.

funny, because i have found nothing beside a deep dark crimson (very typical of the photos you might see). i wonder if temperature has a part to play... also all of my muscimol extracts have been a deep red (water into wine, etc) so i wonder if the pigment is an active component...

The peach ones are found mostly where you would not expect them (south eastern us). I had no idea they grew in my area until I happened upon a patch last year, this year Ive found lots more. They are as potent as the red strain I bought online some years ago. I made a post on the nexus last year when I found them but I cant seem to find the thread, Ill dig up the photos and post one.

I personally live in Denmark, and they're pretty much gone for this year. I started finding them between September-October.

Do you have any references or data to back up that claim? I've found nothing in the literature indicating that ibotenic acid causes that sort of sickness. And the raw fly agarics I ate treated me just fine... though I rarely ate them raw since they are absolutely delicious when cooked into food.


Again, any chance you can back that up with a reference? I never did track down any information on the efficacy of decarboxylation of ibotenic acid by simple heating. I have a vague recollection of coming across a citation of a Japanese food sciences journal article that might have been able to shed light on the question, but never tracked down the article itself.


Quite so:

"UV irradiation of aqueous solutions of ibotenic acid from toadstools leads in 35% yield to muscazone"
Source: Toennies, J.P. 1967. Angewandte Chemie International Edition in English 6(10): 887-888.


In northwestern Oregon, the season ends around the end of November or beginning of December if memory serves, so you better look soon!



Several years ago I wrote a short-ish article on identifying the mushrooms (in North America... I didn't look into possible lookalikes on other continents) with some notes on preparation/use. Looking back on it now, it's appallingly short on citations, but the information in it is still good. I guess I never cross-posted it to this forum, but you can read it here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibotenic_acid
http://datasheets.scbt.com/sc-200449.pdf

Ibotenic acid is a neurotoxin, but you'd have to eat excessive amounts of raw mushrooms in order to get a noticable negative effect from it.
It also has a melting point of about 65 degrees celcius, whereas muscimol is just around 70.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...manita_muscaria#Toxicity

I'm aware it is used in the lab as a neurotoxin, by directly injecting it into the brain of the lab animal. But most people don't inject fly agarics into their brain. Sure, some ibotenic acid may cross the blood brain barrier, which is why I recommend taking fly agarics with garlic -- S-allyl-L-cysteine protects against the damage ibotenic acid causes in lab animal brains (Ito et al. 2003). But I've never yet come across anyone who has brain damage from eating the mushroom.

And I still am not clear about what connection you're implying between ibotenic acid's brain lesioning activity and the fly agaric sickness some people experience. There's an account (Chilton 1975) which describes ingesting 93 mg of pure ibotenic acid and experiencing the sort of inebriation typical of fly agarics, without experiencing the illness that some people get from eating the mushrooms. So I've been under the impression that the sickness is mostly a result of other chemicals in the mushroom.

For the record: I agree it's a good idea to try to convert ibotenic acid into other things as much as possible, just to be on the safe side.


Those figures aren't correct. Ibotenic acid's melting point is in the neighborhood of 150 C, muscimol around 185 C. But I'm not sure what relevance this has to either of the questions I raised?



References

• Chilton, S. 1975. The course of an intentional poisoning. McIlvainea 2:17-18. As cited by Ott, J. 1996. Pharmacotheon. Second edition densified. Natural Products Co., Kennewick, WA.
  
• Ito, Y., M. Ito, N. Takagi, H. Saito, and K. Ishige. 2003. Neurotoxicity induced by amyloid β-peptide and ibotenic acid in organotypic hippocampal cultures: protection by S-allyl-L-cysteine, a garlic compound. Brain Research 985(1): 98-107.

Well, can only thank you for the information provided then

The temperatures were a misunderstanding on my behalf when converting between celcius/fahrenheit.

the first time i attempted to dry this fungus, i did so in the oven, and ended up cooking them.

the psychoactivity was greatly diminished (tho still barely noticeable - possibly because i was using such little heat, and for not much time) but the taste was amazing. possibly even more tasty than portabella. they do lose a little bit of color when they get cooked, but they still look very pretty

Marinate a steak with them or cook some into an omelette and you've got some serious good eats

Washington is famous for A, A+ and A++ grade Amanitas, so you should have no problem finding them in the wild

Yeah, I had no luck this season! Found plenty of psilocybe cyans, though.

I didn't have a lot of time available for hunting with my school schedule. Hopefully next fall will be better. I know in Hammond near the beach they grow like crazy. I noticed them before I knew about them and never grabbed any. I didn't have the chance to make it down there this last year though!

Oh well.

yea, if you make it earlier in the season, you should be able to find a years supply easy.

i actually have hardly touched mine from last season..


do you guys think doing a water extraction and then taking the extracted shroom and washing it with iso, and combining those extracts would be a good way to go?

because i like my crude water extracts (evap'd on LOW heat), but i can't help but feel that they aren't as active as the shroom itself.