In the woods near Crystal Falls lives the Humongous Fungus, one of the oldest and largest living things on Earth
In the woods near Crystal Falls, there is a single living thing that weighs about as much as three blue whales, sprawls underground across some 90 acres, and has been alive for roughly 2,500 years. It is a mushroom.
They call it the Humongous Fungus, and it is one of the strangest claims to fame in the entire U.P.
Here is the thing to understand. It is not a patch of mushrooms. It is one single organism. What you see above ground, the little clumps of honey mushrooms popping up across the forest floor, are just the fruiting tips. The actual creature is a vast underground web of black, root-like threads, all genetically identical, all part of one connected individual.
Nobody knew it was there until the late 1980s, when researchers running tests in the forest noticed the honey mushrooms all around them were genetically the same. They kept looking for where one organism ended and the next began, and they could not find an edge. It was all one thing.
When they published their findings in 1992, the numbers stunned everyone. They estimated the fungus was at least 1,500 years old and weighed over 100 tons. A return trip decades later revised that even higher, to something like 2,500 years old and 440 tons, roughly the weight of three blue whales.
The news went around the world, and the press gave it a name that stuck: the Humongous Fungus. For a while it was hailed as possibly the largest living organism on Earth. It does not hold that title anymore. Bigger relatives have since turned up out west, including a giant fungus in Oregon that dwarfs it. But the Crystal Falls fungus is the one that started it all, the discovery that showed the world fungi could get this big and this old. It is right up there with the 60-year mystery of the Paulding Light on the list of gloriously weird U.P. legends.
And the U.P. being the U.P., the town of Crystal Falls did the only sensible thing. It threw the fungus a party. Every summer, Crystal Falls hosts the Humungus Fungus Fest, a community festival named in honor of the giant mushroom living quietly under the local woods.
For all its size, the fungus is not going anywhere fast or doing anyone any harm. It just sits there, slowly creeping through the soil, eating the occasional tree, growing a little bigger every year, exactly as it has since long before this was Michigan. Like the glowing Yooperlites on the Lake Superior shore, it is one more wonder the U.P. kept hidden in plain sight.
So the next time someone tells you the U.P. is the middle of nowhere, you can set them straight. Tucked in the woods near Crystal Falls is one of the oldest, biggest living things on the planet. And every summer, the locals throw it a party.
Sources: Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, and the journal Nature.
Featured image credit: “Armillaria mellea MdE 3.jpg” by MdE, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 Germany. Cropped/edited for YooperHub if applicable.
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