• Learn about the hidden world of fungi in the B.C. Rainforest 
• Remembering polar explorer Ken Hedges, who served as a medic on the 1969 British Trans-Arctic Expedition
• An exciting interview with Robert Courteau on the fungiverse beneath our feet
• The 2023 RCGS Silent Auction is open! Take a look at some of the incredible items up for bidding

As fungi bloom into the mainstream, a research station hidden in the B.C. Rainforest aims to uncover some of the mysteries of mushrooms 

Branden Walle balances across a moss-covered cedar, long since fallen and now home to a miniature forest of hemlock seedlings and countless other unseen organisms. Sunlight flickers through the rainforest canopy. Gentle waves lap the nearby beach of Kapoose Creek, where a half-hour earlier Walle followed fresh wolf prints in sand still damp from an early morning outgoing tide.

“Let’s go climb that bank. I haven’t explored there yet,” says Walle, director of biology at Kapoose Creek, a secluded research station on the remote west coast of Vancouver Island that is emblematic of a growing worldwide fascination with all things fungi. There’s potential magic in the profusion of mushrooms here. Kapoose Creek is dedicated to unlocking some of this magic and finding new natural drug compounds derived from fungi.

To forage for fungi is to enter a still largely unexplored world of wonders. The hunt never gets old for Walle.

On Easter Day, April 6, 1969, four men — Wally Herbert, Roy ‘Fritz’ Koerner, Allan Gill and Major Ken Hedges — with four teams of Greenland Inuit sled dogs reached the North Pole during an expedition that would go down in history as the first crossing of the surface of the Arctic Ocean, the longest sustained dogsled journey on sea ice in the history of polar exploration, and the first undisputed expedition to reach and return from the North Pole on sea ice. 

Hedges, the last surviving member of the expedition, passed away Oct. 11 at the age of 88. 

A former Royal Army Medical Corps physician and member of the British Special Air Service (SAS), Hedges served as medic on the 476-day, 5,987-kilometre trek across the top of the world from Point Barrow, Alaska, to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Together with his team, Hedges survived encounters with polar bears, endured months of darkness and disorienting weather and battled ice floes. The British Trans-Arctic Expedition has been described as one of the last great polar journeys and would not be possible today due to climate change. 

Last year, as the leaves turned amber and loosened from the branches that held them, something was happening on the forest floor. In the moist shadow of the canopy’s cover, an omnipresent being, which waxes and wanes with the seasons, blooms fruiting bodies from rotting logs, from the earth of the forest floor, from the bark of living trees. Mushrooms. Lichens. (Algae living amongst the filaments of a fungus.) Slime moulds. And in hot pursuit — in this particular month — humans.

Among them, 36-year-old Robert Courteau organized this month-long adventure in an effort to find and record as many fungi, lichens and slime moulds as possible to create a snapshot in time of the fungi world around us. The so-called FungiQuest far surpassed anyone’s expectations, tapping out more than 150,000 observations.

Ottawa-based Courteau, who partnered with Australian tech company BioSMART for their technological expertise, spoke with Canadian Geographic on how FungiQuest came to be — and how fungi may just be our greatest allies for the problems our world is facing.