A Night in the Treehouse: Inside Cedar Falls Mycology's Immersive Mushroom Experience

The Treehouse at Cedar Falls

Thirty minutes east of Seattle, where the Cascades begin and the old-growth forest thickens, sits a 150-square-foot cedar-shake treehouse perched on a two-acre property outside the small mountain town of North Bend, Washington. The structure is small on purpose. Picture windows pull the forest into the room. A lofted queen bed sits beneath the canopy. The trees — Western red cedar, Douglas fir, big-leaf maple — are close enough to touch.

This is the Cedar Falls Treehouse, and it is not an ordinary Airbnb. It is the home base of Cedar Falls Mycology — the podcast, the lectures, the mushroom dinners, and the quiet, long-form mycological education practiced by host Tim Leavitt and his partner Erica.

Who Tim Is

Tim Leavitt has been a professional mycologist longer than most people have been aware mycology existed as a profession. He started foraging mushrooms with his father in Oregon at the age of three. By twelve, he was selling wild mushrooms commercially to local grocers. His career has carried him through Fungi Perfecti — Paul Stamets' research and cultivation company — the University Herbarium at Central Washington University, and a tenure as a USDA Regional Mycologist for the Pacific Northwest, identifying specimens for the United States Forest Service.

He is the author of Cooking Wild Mushrooms (for People Who Don't Like Mushrooms), a cookbook born, as he put it, out of being "tired of hearing people say that they did not like them." And for the last year he has been hosting the Cedar Falls Mycology Podcast, where he and co-host Dan Sullivan interview the people shaping modern mycology — Britt Bunyard of Fungi Magazine, Dr. Gordon Walker, Graham Steinruck, Colin Domnauer, Danny Miller of the Puget Sound Mycological Society.

The Experience

The Treehouse is bookable directly through Airbnb, but the real draw — for anyone who loves fungi — is what happens around the stay itself. Guests can arrange a mushroom dinner hosted by Tim and Erica on the property: a multi-course meal built around wild and cultivated mushrooms, prepared by a working mycologist who knows exactly where each species came from and what it wants to taste like.

Mornings can include a guided foraging walk through the surrounding forest — Cedar Falls sits inside one of the most biodiverse fungal regions in North America. The Pacific Northwest is the birthplace of modern wild-mushroom cuisine; chanterelles, matsutake, king boletes, lobsters, black trumpets, cauliflower mushrooms, and coral fungi all move through the forests here in their seasons. Tim knows the ground the way other people know their commute.

Why It Matters

There is a specific kind of mycological learning that happens only in the field, at close range, over a long evening, with someone who has spent decades with the fungi. Podcasts and books are one layer. A foraging weekend with a USDA-credentialed mycologist, followed by a twelve-course mushroom dinner and a night sleeping in the canopy of an old-growth cedar forest, is another entirely.

Cedar Falls Mycology is less a business and more an invitation — a small, deliberate operation built for people who are serious about fungi and want to spend time in a place where someone else is too.

Plan a Visit

The Cedar Falls Treehouse is located just outside North Bend, Washington — roughly thirty minutes east of downtown Seattle via I-90. Bookings are handled through Airbnb. Mushroom dinners and foraging experiences can be arranged directly with the hosts at .

For ongoing mycology programming, subscribe to the Cedar Falls Mycology Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or Podbean — new episodes release twice monthly.

This article is part of ShroomSpy's ongoing Experience series, documenting the places, people, and events worth traveling for in the fungi kingdom.