Summary:
Features include a dry cap with dark reddish brown scales, free, crowded, white gills that become yellow, a white stem with bands or patches of reddish brown scales below the fibrous ring zone, a white spore deposit, and microscopic characters. Hansen(1) and Moser(1) describe a slightly different taxon with a ring, a feature that according to Richard Sieger is not found in Northwest material.

Cap:
2.5-5cm across, cylindric becoming conic, convex, flattened and finally depressed, bluntly umbonate; disc dark reddish brown, toward margin with concentric bands of small fibrous scales the color of the disc, ground color tan with a rusty tinge, some white flesh showing in cracks when old; presumably dry, (Sieger), 2-4cm across, bell-shaped, broad with umbo; reddish ocher, breaking into scales scarcely on crown, markedly at edge, (Moser)

Flesh:
white (Sieger)

Gills:
free, crowded; white aging yellowish, (Sieger)

Stem:
4-10cm x 0.4-0.9cm at top, equal or slightly widened toward base; white aging reddish brown, smooth in upper part, with bands or patches of reddish brown scales in lower part, no orange wash on base, (Sieger), 1.5-3.5cm x 0.2-0.5cm, whitish, with brownish ring, with several zones the same color as the cap at base, (Moser)

Veil:
ring "a raised fibrous zone, white, may have dark brown scales, may be absent", (Sieger)

Microscopic spores:
spores (5.5) 6-8.4 x 3-4 (5.6) microns, elliptic to oval, profile asymmetric, thick-walled, [presumably smooth], germ pore absent, yellowish in Melzer''s reagent, (inamyloid); pleurocystidia absent, cheilocystidia ventricose to clavate, cap cuticle "interwoven hyphae supporting pileocystidia, similar to a trichoderm", (Sieger), spores 6-7 x 4-4.5 microns, (Moser)

Spore deposit:
white (Sieger)

Notes:
Smith(6) says it is found in the Pacific Northwest. It was reported by W. Sundberg from WA and OR, (Ammirati(11)). There are collections by Paul Kroeger from BC deposited at the University of British Columbia. Collections were examined from CA and NS (Ammirati(11)).

EDIBILITY

potentially deadly - has amanitins (Sieger)