Ok, when I said that I suspect that C. subalpinus is a species complex
in referring to Prof. Bruns’ collection, I had this in mind. Here is a
collection of something that I thought at various times to be
C. subalpinus, or just a sibling, or not at all, or C. subalpinus
var. X, back and forth…

“http://mushroomhobby.com/...;

One may say that the most striking similarity between this and the
Professor’s collection is the mostly lignicolous habit. Normal
C. subalpinus can be interpreted as mainly terrestrial, but not
always… And the darker disk of the cap is a bit more than the
typical C. subalpinus, but then again, it could be non-determining
collection character. But then again, as the photo assembly above
indicates, I have pondered on those issues long before before I had
any academic support locally, but at least I documented my collections.

This is a very common Spring Leprocybe in California. These guys fruit a bit after the first echelon of snowbank fungi and can commonly be seen between the time when the Morels and the Spring Boletes fruit. They are a classic Leprocybe. This particular collection was young material (a very nice photo) and Tom, Else and I looked at it in a dark room with the UV. Again, so far the name C. subalpinus Moser nom. prov. seems to exist only in the Western mycological folklore as I am not familiar with any description in the open space. Due to the fact that the provisional author is no longer with us and it is unlikely that he will complete the description, we should probably use Cortinarius sp. and apply full study to all new collections. Particularly because now we have the means to better estimate how many species there are, as I suspect that C. subalpinus is a complex of species because I see significant variety, particularly between the Central Sierra and the Shasta/Cascade range. But again, these are only conjectures that need to be studied/verified. The prudent thing is to treat all collections as new and unknown and start from there.

Here are some of my photo ruminations on the C. subalpinus subject.

http://www.mushroomhobby.com/...