Texas mushroom foraging walk explores rare fungi at David Lewis Property

East Texas rewards the forager who reads habitat as closely as the cap and stem. At the David Lewis Property in Bleakwood, the mix of upland pine, beech-magnolia-pine-oak slope forest, baygall, hardwood floodplain and cypress-tupelo slough gives a guided walk the kind of ecological range that field guides alone cannot show.

The Texas Master Naturalists Lower Trinity Basin Chapter has scheduled the Mushroom Foraging Walk for June 20, 2026, at 10 a.m. on the 60-acre Newton County site. Participants are set to spend a few hours hunting before returning to the house for lunch and a species discussion, a structure that turns the outing into both a search and a teaching session. The chapter, which serves Chambers and Liberty counties, says its public work includes conservation education, volunteer stewardship, outreach, wildlife and habitat information, and community science.

The property itself is a lesson in why fungi track water, trees and microhabitat. Thickety Creek borders one side and Screw Pin borders the other, while the forest is described as fairly open with easy walking. That matters in Deep East Texas, where dead zones and no cell service make preparation part of the craft. Visitors are being told to plan on GPS, local maps or paper maps, a reminder that a successful hunt still depends on navigation as much as curiosity.

The numbers behind the site explain why mycologists keep coming back. The listing says five new mushroom species have already been recorded there, about 700 mushroom species have been collected over the past 25 years, and about 250 plant species grow on the property. For foragers, that is a working map of how a single patch of land can produce a rich fungal calendar when soil, moisture and tree associations line up.

Lewis gives the walk its scientific weight. He is described as a legendary mycologist and the author of Mushrooms of the Gulf Coast States, published by University of Texas Press in 2019 with more than 1,000 common and lesser-known species. A Native Plant Society of Texas biography says Lewis is a retired chemist with degrees from Lamar University, has about 5,000 fungal collections at the Field Museum of Natural History and about 5,500 at the Tracy Herbarium at Texas A&M University, and served as fungal TWIG coordinator for the Big Thicket National Preserve All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory from 2006 to 2018.

The walk is being presented as family friendly and accessible, with an easy, leisurely pace and frequent stops in earlier listings. That is the real appeal of the David Lewis Property: it does not just offer a chance to find mushrooms, it shows how East Texas habitat teaches identification from the ground up.