Thank you to all of our guests and fans who voted for us in the USA Today 10Best Corn Maze Contest! We are honored to be recognized as one of the best corn mazes in the U.S.
See all the winners here — USA Today 10Best Contest : Corn Maze
2021 Schrödinger’s Cat and Other Thought Experiments Corn Maze
USA Today
Wisconsin Weekend: Designing And Operating Corn Mazes
Curious about Wisconsin corn mazes? Wondering about the Treinen design process? Listen to Angie’s interview on WPR’s Morning Show:
https://www.wpr.org/wisconsin-weekend-designing-and-operating-corn-mazes
From USA Today:
The 10Best Readers’ Choice Award contest launches new categories every other Monday at noon, revealing each category’s 20 nominees. After 4 weeks of voting, the contest closes on the 28th day at noon. On the Friday after voting ends, winners are revealed. Rules allow the public the right to vote online for one nominee per category, per day.
Nominees for all categories are chosen by a panel of relevant experts which include a combination of editors from USA TODAY; editors from 10Best.com; relevant expert contributors; and sources for both these media and other Gannett properties.
10Best.com provides users with original, unbiased, and experiential travel content of top attractions, things to see and do, and restaurants for top destinations in the U.S. and around the world. The core of the site’s uniqueness is its team of local travel experts: a well-traveled and well-educated group who are not only experts in their fields – and their cities – but discriminating in their tastes. These local experts live in the city they write about so the content is constantly updated. 10Best.com averages 5 million visitors per month.
Every year we need to come up with an amazing maze theme–which is a lot of pressure! We need a design that is interesting, recognizable, complex, and gives us a story to tell or at least easy conversation starters.
This year, the maze is the Rudyard Kipling Just-So Story, The Elephant’s Child. It is about how the curious little elephant got its trunk (spoiler: the crocodile pulled its nose really hard…) Kipling is most well known for his other beloved children’s story, The Jungle Book.
Here is a link to the written version of the story
Here’s an animated version of video of the story
We’ll have a lot more about the maze coming up, but here’s a little preview photo for you.
Check out the USA Today 10Best website to see our maze! It’s so awesome to be featured on the site, and it’s also great to see the mazes that farms around country have designed this year. We’ve met many corn maze operators from all over when we’ve gone to various corn maze conventions in the off season (bet you didn’t know there was such a thing as a “corn maze convention” Well, there is. And they’re lots of fun.)
Take a look at the photos of mazes on this list. They’re all good mazes, but some of the images are actual photos and some are “mock-ups” of the design superimposed on corn or on an aerial photo (ours is an actual photo, BTW. Alan went up in a small plane and took about a gazillion photos to get one with the light juuuust right…)
Preliminary drone photo of the 2014 Athena’s Owl Maze.
Designing the corn maze is a challenge every year. I’ve gotten better at handling the actual, physical design using Adobe Illustrator (not the easiest program to teach yourself, BTW…) but the theme is always tricky.
Here are some of the parameters I always set for the design:
New parameter for 2014: must be awesome enough for outdoor advertising–last year our Kraken maze made incredible billboards, so this year I wanted to also make something that could looking amazing and maybe a little scary for the outdoor people to work with. That’s why the owl turned out so creepy…
I’ll post more on the math and mythology connections in the maze, but the basic ideas involve geometry (most prominently the Platonic solids) and the Greek mythology stories of Athena.
Maze plan with grid and cutting aids (circles and golden spiral templates) overlaid
So, contrary to popular belief, the corn maze does not simply appear in our cornfield one day…it would be awesome to wake up one morning and find a giant squid visible from the tower, but alas, we need to rely on forced labor (OK, not really forced…) in the hot sun to get the design in the field.
Here’s how we do it:
1) Finalize the design. This can involve heated discussions between the designer (Angie) and the farmer (Alan) but eventually we come up with the plan.
3) Stake the cornfield. This allows the workers to figure out where they are and relate that to the plan, which is printed out on a grid. We don’t use GPS, as our design is so complex it would be difficult to get the accuracy we need.
4) Transfer the design from the grid on the page to the grid in the field, using paint and flags to mark the trails.
5) Mow the trails as a preliminary step–corn that has been mowed off at this stage will still grow back, so if a mistake has been made, it will hopefully be caught before the next step…
6) Till out the trails. This removes the corn plants, and so the tilled trails are “permanent”–they had better be in the right spot! (although Alan has been known to take “artistic liberties” with the design on several occasions.)
Sometimes the reaction to the design is “Are you kidding me? You want me to cut that!?”
Sections can be enlarged to help get the details right–trails must be laid out accurately to 6 inches.
For perfect circles, we find the center point, measure the radius, and paint the circle. This year’s maze has a LOT of circles…which is good (check out all of those circles on the tentacles!)
Once a trail is marked with paint or flags (and double-checked against the plan), we mow the corn short.
The crew leader consults with everyone who is marking and checks over the layout. It takes about a week to get the design in the field.
Tilling is the last step–it’s the equivalent of drawing in pen, because it removes the corn permanently.
The dogs don’t actually help, but they’re cute.
Finally! The design for 2013 is finished, and the crew is working on getting it cut into the field!
The inspiration for this year’s maze started with thinking about octopi, which are one of my favorite animals.
I collected a lot of images of octopi, but I realized that an octopus wasn’t quite exciting enough on its own…but a giant squid, or better yet, a Kraken, is definitely maze-worthy.
Once I settled on the squid, I found some old maps that had sea monsters and often really ornate compass roses, which worked well.
I tried to fit in some other images, like the face of the wind blowing and the ship sailing over the edge of the world, but they didn’t work within the size of the field.
Ideas for maze design
Maze Design 2013: The clock is ticking, so it’s time to engage in some useful procrastination as I sit down to do the maze design…
Part of the brainstorming process for maze design is in free-associating with ideas and images until some kind of coherent, useful theme coalesces out of the maelstrom. Here are some thoughts that have made it onto one list or another and I found in my maze design folder:
optical illusions; spiders; webs; carousels; gardens;trees; snakes (coiled, see Navaho sand paintings); maps; compass rose; DNA; life sciences–animals/insects/plants/viruses/bacteria/prions
Les Caux cave paintings; drones (as in UAVs); Platonic solids; triangles; three-dimensional designs; exploded views; snake eating its tail; Galapagos tortoises; moon; Singularity; sphere; torus; visual paradoxes;
Map of prime numbers; crop circles; hawk/eagle; unicorn; badger; bees/beehive; octopus; owls; tapestries; planets; solar systems/galaxies
I think that the thing that Alan and I love most about our corn maze is the process of creation–all of it, from brainstorming and sketching, to actual design, and then to the task of carving it into the corn field. This year, we’ve partnered with the Center for Engagement in Madison WI , to turn our incredibly fun but private process into something that can be actually experienced by young people: the very first “Maze Mania” summer camp.
The camp will consist of twelve kids and three teachers, and their task will be to work with Alan and I as they learn the maze design and cutting process. And it’s not easy work: they’ll be challenged to come up with a design (for the Children’s Maze) that meets very specific parameters, and part of the camp is spent actually cutting the maze into the cornfield on a (probably) hot summer day.
For me, the camp is about sharing the joyfulness of math and design art and seeing a project through from the beginning to completion. I spend a good week designing the big maze, and Alan spends another week cutting it, so in early summer we just living and breathing the maze 24/7. It’s pretty intense, but fun. It’s not often that a real-world business has a process like this that is both interesting and accessible to young people, so we are eager to share the experience.
Visit us at the Treinen Farm Corn Maze & Pumpkin Patch!
W12420 WI Trunk 60
Lodi, WI 53555
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