Corn maze construction requires hard work
Thank the cows for the Little Bear Bottoms Corn Maze. What began as a rotation crop sod and a way to feed the cows of Rosehill dairy turned into 10 years of family tradition.
“We were a sod farm,” said Sharma Clark, who owns the Wellsville maze with her husband, Jed. “We grew corn as a rotation crop to kill all the bad grass. So we would grow the corn, and then sell it to a farmer. Well, he had sold the herd in August. So we had all this corn and nothing to do. That was 10 years ago.”
Creating the maze and other attractions requires two months of daily work, Clark said.
“It’s pretty intense, actually,” she said. “Even though you do it every year, it’s just planting the corn, and making the maze, and stacking the bales and making the trail, setting everything up again. It takes about two months to get everything ready to open, like working every day.”
Maze owner Jed Clark said making the maze trails all depends on how the corn is planted.
“We grid it out on a map,” he said. “The corn, when you plant it, is in rows. So we know how far apart each row is, so you know how wide each row is. When it’s just short, you start figuring out where the trail goes.”
Every year the maze has a new design with the goal of keeping participants lost for hours, Jed said.
“Every year it is different,” he said. “We’ve done pictures and other stuff. The pictures are harder to make it hard to keep people lost. Our goal is to keep people in there for several hours.”
While nothing nefarious can be found in the maze, the haunted river trail attraction continues to grow each year.
“What has gotten bigger every year is the trail,” Clark said. “We don’t haunt the corn maze. A lot of people, that’s what they do, they haunt corn mazes. That just turns out to be stalkers though. The haunted trail, this whole area, we do go into the corn a whole bunch. This is where we have scenes along the trial just bunched up to scare people. The maze is just to get lost and have fun but this is what gets bigger every year, the haunted trail.”
Automated scare attractions have also been added to the haunted trail.
“I’ve been helping them do a few automated scares using sensors and automated sensors,” said Michael Brower, a former mechanical engineer and neighbor to the Clarks.
Brower said there was a possibility for more automated attractions to be added as the month progresses.
“It’s a lot of work,” he said. “Throughout the month we will find some things, add a few more things. It’s fun to come up with ideas and ways to scare people.”
Jed said the inspiration for a haunted trail came when he was irrigating the farm at night.
“It’s already a scary place,” he said. “You go down next to a river and something jumps out. You just can’t get that in a building. It’s sort of red neck, it’s farmer. The stuff that scares us at night while we are irrigating, we turn around and scare people the same way. Just good old fashioned fun, scary.”
What also sets the haunted trail apart is the way participants enter. Rather than large groups moving along the trail at the same time, groups are limited to only a few couples at a time. Jed said this makes the attractions even more frightening because none of the spook surprises are given away.
This is a tactic that haunted trail employee Sam Parsons knows well. Parsons, who is in his second year of working the trail, said participants should be prepared for anything.
“Always be prepared because sometimes people will sneak up on you when you least expect it,” he said.
However, those that work the haunted trail can do their job too well, Sharma said.
“We just give them their specific jobs in the haunted trail then have them practice,” she said. “All during the season there’s about four of us that walk through and check on them [the haunted trail employees]. We walk through and give them pointers but mostly we walk through to check on them because people get afraid that go in there but [the] ones at most risk are the scarers. People react so we tell them to, ‘keep your distance. Make sure you’ve got some personal space there.’”
What keeps the Clarks recreating the maze and other attractions every year is the opportunity to provide autumn fun, Sharma said.
“We like to do this so people can come enjoy something, enjoy autumn,” she said. “It’s fun to have something to do something in the fall. It’s just fun to have something to provide that people to come and do.”
— katherine.l.larsen@gmail.com