Found in the western United States, the mushroom is characterized by its stout fruit body including blue-tinted cap margin and stipe, blue-grey to bluish green gills, and odor of rancid meal.

The species was first described by Orson K. Miller in 1984 from collections he made in Payette National Forest, in the Rocky Mountains of central Idaho in the early 1980s.

The cap surface is felt-like and moist, and covered with a coarse network of cracks and small crevices.

The gills, colored bluish-green to gray, have a close to somewhat distant spacing and an adnate to slightly decurrent attachment to the stipe.

The dingy cream flesh bruises a fading bluish-gray to blue-green when injured, and smells strongly of rancid meal.