Summary:
Section Hispidoderma. Features include a dark brown cap with a wrinkled surface that is granular to velvety, yellowish flesh, free, crowded, broad gills that are whitish before turning pinkish brown from spores, a stem that is brown or paler, with velvety material in patches, growth on wood, and microscopic characters including pleurocystidia and cheilocystidia that are both obtusely fusoid-ventricose. Smith(6) (with Latin italicized) comment that if "one finds a collection with yellow gill margins it is more than likely var. umbrosellus Atkinson in Kauffman".

Cap:
2-6cm across, convex, becoming broadly convex to nearly flat, umbonate; "brown on the disc with yellow between the ridges"; "wrinkled and ridged from the disc to the margin, granular to velvety plush to the unaided eye", (Bessette), 2-5(10)cm across, convex to more or less flat; "dark brown with only a slight yellowish tint"; "granulose to the naked eye", (Smith)

Flesh:
yellowish, (Bessette)

Gills:
free, crowded; white becoming pinkish, (Bessette), "free, crowded, broad, ventricose"; pallid at first, (Smith)

Stem:
3-7cm x 0.2-0.6cm, nearly equal, solid; brown or paler; dry, velvety, (Bessette), 3-8cm x 0.2-0.5(1)cm, equal; "velvety to plushlike, this material in patches toward the base"

Odor:
not distinctive (Bessette)

Taste:
somewhat disagreeable (Bessette), slightly disagreeable (Smith)

Microscopic spores:
spores 5-6.5 x 4-5 um, broadly elliptic, smooth, colorless, (Bessette), spores 5-6.5 x 4-5 microns, broadly elliptic in side view; pleurocystidia 50-70 x 12-20 microns, "obtusely fusoid-ventricose"; cheilocystidia "similar to pleurocystidia but smaller"; clamp connections absent, (Smith);

Spore deposit:
dull pink (Bessette)

Notes:
Smith(6) gives the range in North America as "Great Lakes area east and southward", but it has been recorded independently by several observers in WA, and listed by Lowe(1) from BC.

EDIBILITY

unknown (Bessette)