See you and Manda in a few weeks!

Temecula Big Horse Corn Maze

I like mazes; like building them, like going through them. For ~5 years I had the opportunity to help construct a crawl maze each year at our church’s harvest festival, so mazes just appeal to me a lot. A few weeks ago, I saw a link to an articled titled “Family lost in corn maze calls 911” had me pretty intrigued. A group of us were able to check out a corn maze up in Temecula on Saturday and it was a pretty cool experience. As with most things in life, it’s the people you go with that make the experience so big thanks to everyone who came out and made it enjoyable!

“Contemplative in a corn field” (photo by J.Yee)

The maze is open in the afternoon on weekdays and 10am – 4pm on weekends. Since it appears to be a mom and pop operation it make senses that it doesn’t open too late. The clientele that would enjoy late night mazes are probably not the ideal customers they’re targeting. The prospect of doing this maze at night would be a lot of fun though.

The corn height for most of the maze is ~7 ft tall. The 2nd picture isn’t reprepresentative of the entire maze, just a small corner. If need be you can always squirm through the stalks, unless you’re on the much larger side. Corn can’t be grown that densely together.

The whole operation is geared towards kids and so thats a huge caveat right there. This isn’t a really difficult maze. The map on the left shows this year’s layout but you’ll see that though there seems to be a lot of different ways around, there aren’t too many dead ends or tricks.

There are various check points throughout the maze so that makes it easier to know you are progressing correctly through the maze (the #’s to the left aren’t exact but generalized from memory).

Our group was ~15 people (all adults) so that helped us figure out a lot of the layout quite rapidly. At various forks in the road we’d split off into two groups and find ourselves at the same point later in line. I could imagine that if we’d gone in pairs we’d have a harder time.

That being said, I had quite a difficult time around #3. We ran into the same checkpoint a good 4-5 times and for a second there I was pretty happy this maze did pose a bit of challenge. Some in our group finished in 15-20 minutes and others finished in ~30+ minutes.

The layout changes each year so there’s reason to come back next year.

Recommendations for maximum enjoyment:

1. Go in the morning: We got there around 10:30am and there was no wait but by the time we left around noon there was quite a line waiting to get in. The temperature rises pretty quickly from morning to afternoon too so we had a much more enjoyable time.
2. small group size: separate your group and send people in pairs at a time or 3-4 at a time in 5-10 min intervals. It’s much more difficult than having one large group and having everyone spread out at distinct forks.
3. There is an option to go through the maze with a map. A lot of parents with young children or strollers do this option. Don’t follow them and try to either pass them early or let them go ahead of you a good few minutes. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of the game when you follow someone with the answers.
4. It might be fun to try a portion of the maze blind folded. Start off as a pair and have one person blindfolded until they hit the checkpoint at which time the other person would be blindfolded. The other person could help out when there are other people to avoid. There’s a lot of external queues to which part of the maze you should be heading because you can hear traffic on one side and see a pumpkin patch on another edge.

www.bighorsecornmaze.com

**Updated**

A.Jang sent me a link to a Norcal corn maze that’s apparently a world record breaker at 45 acres (Temecula’s was only 12)! Check it out if you’re around Dixon/Davis area. Thanks AJ!  [link]

Giants at Padres: 6-4 victory Giants!