The Cumberland Fungus Fest Weekend Pass Doesn't Actually Get You Onto The Trails

Walk down Dunsmuir Avenue in the last week of September and you'll start to see it: a sandwich board outside Harmonic Arts, a stack of flyers at the bakery counter, someone at Cumberland Brewing Co. asking the bartender if the Saturday dinner is sold out yet. The Cumberland Community Forest Society's Fungus Fest returns for its seventh year from Thursday, October 1 through Sunday, October 4, 2026, and if you've lived in the village through even one previous edition, you already know the general shape of the weekend. What you might not know, because it changed quietly somewhere around the fifth or sixth year, is that buying a ticket to the festival and getting to actually walk the trails with a mycologist are now two separate transactions.

That distinction is the entire reason this piece exists. Every other write-up treats Fungus Fest as one event with one price. It isn't, and understanding the gap between the two purchases is the difference between a weekend spent in a tent listening to talks and a weekend spent in the second-growth forest behind the village finding chanterelles with someone who's spent decades studying them.

One Block On Dunsmuir Runs The Whole Weekend

For most of its run, Fungus Fest has organized itself around a single stretch of Dunsmuir Avenue. Harmonic Arts, at 2660 Dunsmuir, has served as festival headquarters in past editions, the spot where after-school programs and the first guided walks of the weekend have historically staged. A few doors down, the Lower Cultural Centre at 2674 Dunsmuir has hosted the bulk of the talks, workshops, and specimen tables in recent years. That's not an accident of scheduling. It means a Cumberland resident can park once, or not drive at all, and cover most of the weekend on foot, ducking into the bakery or the brewery between sessions rather than treating the festival like something you have to plan a whole day around.

The forest itself, the actual subject of the festival, sits just outside that walkable core. Guided walks head into the Cumberland Community Forest, the same network of trails locals use every other weekend of the year for mountain biking and dog walks, except for four days in October it's populated by people crouched over stumps with hand lenses.

What Four Years Of Price Tags Tell You

The festival has gotten more expensive every year it's run, and the pattern is worth laying out plainly, because it tells you something about how fast this thing has grown from a niche village gathering into something people now plan trips around.

That's a jump of roughly two-thirds in adult pricing over three editions, and the 2025 early bird passes sold out before the general public sale even opened. The Cumberland Community Forest Society hasn't published 2026 pricing as of this writing, but if the trend holds, waiting until the week of the festival to decide you want in is a bad bet. The organization's ticketing page is the place to check before you assume last year's price still applies.

The Pass Is Step One, Not Step Two

Here's the part that catches people who've only been once or twice. A weekend pass gets you into the talks, the workshops, the family activities, and the Friday night Fungus Bazaar. It does not automatically get you onto a guided walk. As the festival's own ticketing language put it for the 6th Annual event, you must have a weekend pass before you're even eligible to register for a walk, and that registration is a separate step with its own limited capacity.

This wasn't always structured so tightly. Earlier editions, back when the festival was in its second and third years, ran walk registration more loosely alongside general admission. By the sixth year, the gate had tightened into two distinct hurdles: buy the pass, then race to register for the specific walks you actually want, because in-person talks have historically capped around 50 participants and walks fill on a similar timeline.

If the guided walk is the reason you're going, and for a lot of people in a forest town, it is, then the pass is necessary but not sufficient. You need to treat walk registration as its own deadline, not an afterthought that happens automatically once you've paid.

Where The Rest Of The Village Fits Around It

None of this happens in a vacuum separate from the rest of Cumberland's food and drink scene, and that's part of what makes the weekend feel like a village event rather than an imported one. Cumberland Brewing Co. has sponsored past editions and its patio tends to fill with festival-goers comparing notes on what they found on their walk. Biblio Taco, a few blocks over, has built enough of a local following that a lunch recommendation there barely needs to be finished before someone's already agreeing. The Cumberland Village Bakery on Dunsmuir remains the fixture it's always been for anyone who needs a coffee and something baked before a 9 a.m. forest walk. Love's Ice Cream, running out of a converted trailer, is the kind of small operation that gives the whole street its particular texture rather than feeling like a festival pop-up grafted onto a town that doesn't otherwise support it.

That matters for a simple reason. A festival that only exists because a nonprofit trucks in outside vendors for one weekend a year tells you nothing about a place. A festival that slots naturally into businesses that were already there, run by people who live here the other 361 days of the year, tells you the event grew out of something real.

How To Actually Get Into The Walks This Year

If you want the forest experience and not just the tent full of talks, a few things are worth doing before the first weekend of October arrives:

• Check the Cumberland Community Forest Society's fungus fest page for 2026 pricing and the walk schedule as soon as it's posted, historically a couple of weeks before the event itself.
• Buy the weekend pass first. You cannot register for a walk without one, and passes themselves have sold out early in at least one recent year.
• Register for specific walks the moment that window opens rather than waiting to decide once you're already at the festival. Past editions have capped walks and filled them within days.
• If you only want one thing and don't need the full pass, watch for single-event options like Thursday's walk-up Science Pub tickets or Friday's pay-what-you-can Bazaar entry, both of which have existed in past years as lower-commitment ways in.

What This Says About October In Cumberland

The festival has grown up around a genuine local identity rather than replacing one. Dawn Copeman, who has lived in Cumberland for more than three decades and was an early member of the Cumberland Community Forest Society, has described her fascination with slime molds with the kind of specificity that only comes from actually walking these trails for years, not from reading about them. Executive director Meaghan Cursons has talked about fungus as, in her words, "a great connector," the kind of framing that only makes sense once you've watched a mycologist, a herbalist, and a bat researcher all present at the same four-day event without it feeling forced.

That's the real signal buried under the ticket tiers and registration deadlines. Cumberland didn't hire a festival production company to manufacture a fall attraction. A community forest society built something interdisciplinary enough to hold death cafes, mushroom cultivation workshops, and a square dance in the same weekend, and it worked well enough that the price has climbed every single year because people keep showing up anyway.

If you want more on what makes this village tick outside of festival season, our Cumberland neighborhood page is a decent starting point. And if you're the kind of person who reads a piece like this because you're quietly wondering what it would be like to live somewhere the whole town turns out for a mushroom festival, that's a conversation Stevie Cauvier has often. No pressure, no forms, just someone who knows which walk to register for first.