Summary:
Features include a dry, fibrillose-scaly cap (unusual for Stropharia), crowded, narrow gills that are pallid soon becoming violet-gray, and a scaly whitish stem with a fragile membranous ring. The cap scales and fibrils are yellowish brown to cinnamon brown or gray brown on a yellowish or tan background It is rare.

Cap:
6-15cm across, broadly convex with incurved margin, remaining convex with spreading margin or becoming flat; covered with brown to yellowish brown or grayish brown scales ("wood brown", "tawny olive", "ochraceous-tawny" or "cinnamon-brown") on a dull yellowish or tan background ("warm buff"); dry, densely innately fibrillose-scaly, scales more or less squarrose over disk and merely recurved toward margin, (Smith), margin sometimes hung with veil remnants (Arora)

Flesh:
thick, about 1.5cm over disc, abruptly tapering to margin, soft but not fragile; white in cap, whitish in stem, (Smith)

Gills:
depressed adnate, often attached only by a tooth, crowded (65-115 reaching stem), very narrow 0.2-0.35cm, "very thin and breaking transversely readily"; pallid but soon becoming "drab"; often crisped, edges oven eroded, (Smith), adnate or notched, close or crowded, narrow, thin; "pallid becoming gray, then purple-gray to purple-black"; edges often eroded, (Arora)

Stem:
6-10cm x 1.5-3cm, "equal more or less, often compressed, hollow, fleshy, firm"; whitish but strongly tinged "cream color" toward base; squarrose scaly above and below ring, becoming fibrillose-scaly when old (scales above ring from the stem surface, below ring formed from lacerated stem tissue as well as veil tissue), base with numerous white rhizomorphs, (Smith), equal or slightly swollen at base; whitish or creamy; "with erect or recurved fibrillose scales, especially below the ring", "base often with white mycelial threads", (Arora)

Veil:
ring superior, submembranous, evanescent [fleeting], (Smith), "membranous, forming a fragile, white, superior ring" soon darkened by falling spores, or often disappearing when old, (Arora)

Odor:
subnauseous (Smith), unpleasant (Miller)

Taste:
subnauseous (Smith), unpleasant (Miller)

Microscopic spores:
spores 6-8 x 4-4.5 microns, elliptic, smooth, apical germ pore absent or minute; chrysocystidia present on gills (Arora), spores 6-8 x 4-4.5 microns, elliptic, apical germ pore lacking; basidia 4-spored; cheilocystidia 50-60 x 10-12 microns, "subcylindric to subfusoid, apices acute or obtuse"; cap trama "homogeneous with aggregations of fibrils projecting from the surface layer which cause the conspicuous scales", (Smith)

Spore deposit:
dark purple-brown to purple-black (Arora)

Notes:
It has been found mostly in WA, (Smith). It is found in northern CA, the Pacific Northwest, and in the Southwest and southern Rocky Mountains, (Arora). It has been found in MT (Miller), and AB (Schalkwijk-Barendsen). There are collections from BC at the University of British Columbia, and a collection from OR at Oregon State University.

EDIBILITY

unknown (Arora)