Identification: Pholiota? Stropharia?

Southern Rocky Mountains in northern New Mexico USA. Spruce forest. 10,400 ft asl. Alongside the Rio Quemado. The diameter of the cap of the largest one is about 2.5 inches.

Not Pholiota squarrosa.

lat/lon:
35.990185, -105.663240

Admins: I was going to attach a kml to show the location on google earth, but that is not allowed. Any thoughts of allowing some sort of gps data to be attached to a question?

 

That's a nice photo, but it's hard to determine the color of the gills. A spore print would be very useful.

 

Thanks for your reply. You can see the color of the gills, sort of an off-white. You can also see that the gills are alternately attached / not attached. I didn't take a specimen, first because I'd never seen them before and didn't want to take something that was potentially rare in the area and second because I thought they were fairly distinctive such that identifying them would be too difficult. Hmph.

 

They do resemble Pholiotas, but a spore print is needed to be sure. However, they don't look like any of the common ones that I've seen. Were they growing on dead wood under the surface vegetation?

 

The substrate wasn't obvious in that the were coming out of soil, but there might have been dead wood underneath that.

My current thinking is now Cystoderma.

 

I noticed that the ring on the specimen closest to the camera has some brown color on top. This might come from brown spores, but it certainly is not conclusive. Without a spore print, it will be difficult to determine the genus.