Trying Not To Get Lost In An Elaborate Corn Maze A Wyoming Fall Rite Of Passage

Wyoming fall activities this political season may include carving pumpkins, playing cornhole and horseshoes, and shooting an apple into the face of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

That’s part of the fun at corn mazes around Wyoming, a seasonal rite of passage that can lead to getting lost in an agricultural labyrinth.

Green Acres Corn Maze near Casper offers a 10-acre puzzle of pathways cut into a cornfield for people to navigate their way through. In Clark, Wyoming, a 15-acre maze includes quiz questions to help people find their way through.

Green Acres owner Steven Syverts has been hosting the maze for 13 years, adding onto it as it goes. Now it also includes a petting farm, pumpkin cart rides, grain train, apple cannons, corn pit, an air pillow for kids to jump on, hay bale maze and children’s mining for gems and arrowheads.

For $1 a shot, the air-compressed apple cannons allow people to try to hit targets mounted on big hay bales that feature the mugs of Trump or Harris. The Harris target appeared to have taken more hits during a Cowboy State Daily visit.

Maze staffer Tate Chamberlain said the cannons get a workout on the weekends.

“It’s a good time for families,” he said. “You have to arc your shot, and every apple is different. Sometimes the bigger the apple that fits the bore of the barrel, the straighter the shot it shoots.”

Irrigation Important

Chamberlain said that growing corn in central Wyoming can be challenging with the frosts that can come either at the beginning of the season when the crop first comes out of the ground or in the fall as the maze opens.

Getting the corn to its desired 8-10 feet in height comes the from fertilizer as well as water from the Casper Alcova Irrigation District.

Chamberlain said there typically aren’t any issues with people getting lost — though they have come out the front entrance stating they hit a dead end.

“In our case there are three different paths you can take,” he said. “There is the path straight to the farm, the big maze and the short maze.”

There is also an elevated platform for people to climb and find or direct a loved one who may have lost their way.

As for the maze design, Syverts said the process of how it’s developed and cut each year is not something he shares.

“We don’t discuss what the process is,” he said. “It’s a trade secret.”

Syverts did say that each year the design includes a cross and a Pepsi logo — a Wyoming soft-drink distributor is a maze sponsor.

The design last year was centered around the face of Reba McEntire who in 2023 cut a commercial for the corn maze. This year the maze shape features the face of a cow, the number “307” with the zero being a Pepsi logo, a sunflower, pig, goat, the abbreviation “WYO” and a chicken.

Food vendors also are on hand for weekend visitors at the maze. Syverts estimates nearly 20,000 will travel down Bishop Road to the farm on the northwest side of Casper before the season ends Oct. 27.

While the maze is open on weekends for the public, school groups from the region have been taking advantage of the activities on weekdays.

Clark’s Maze

In Clark, Bridget Gallagher of Gallagher Natural Beef and her family are in the ninth year of hosting a corn maze and pumpkin patch 30 miles north of Cody near the base of the Beartooth Mountains not far from the Montana state line.

Frost and wind have already removed the leaves of the 8-foot cornstalks this year, but people are still having fun, she said. And Gallagher is willing to share her trade secret for how the maze is designed and cut.

“Yeah, it’s crazy. My husband just walks it out and I follow him on the lawn mower — and every year he makes a good one,” she said. “It is always different. We don’t use GPS or anything like that.

“We go in when the corn in about knee high and we just use our riding lawn mower because the corn is real soft at that stage and we can just mow it down. And then we go back in closer to maze time and clean up the paths.”

During their early years, Gallagher said her husband would make the maze more complicated and people would be “freaking out.” Now, the mission is just to make it enjoyable.

As with the maze in Casper, she said they sometimes will have someone get lost in the maze, but the goal isn’t to get people lost. Gallagher said when they first started doing the maze, they planted it closer to the other activities at the ranch and a child wandered into it and was temporarily lost.

They have since moved the maze farther way and there have been no issues.

Gallagher gives out maps that will allow visitors to typically make it through within 15 minutes, while those that don’t use it take about a half hour.

Like the Casper cornfield, the long stalks of corn on their ranch are only possible through irrigation.

“We have a really good irrigation system. We are really fortunate with that. As long as we have mountain water and snowpack, we irrigate off of snowmelt,” she said.

Their ranch is near the Clark Fork of the Yellowstone River.

Quiz Questions

The Clark maze also makes trivia part of the experience, with five quiz questions related to agriculture that help direct participants along the correct path.

“They will come up to a little sign and it will have one question on it and then some answers to pick from,” she said. “If they pick the right answer, it will lead them down the right path. If they pick the wrong one, it could loop them around or take them to a dead end.”

The questions were developed by Gallagher’s daughter. One asks about the “meanest” breed of cattle. The three multiple choice answers: “Charolais, Angus or Jersey.” (A Google search seems to show the answer is Charolais.)

The ranch also boasts a pumpkin patch, but due to the unpredictable frosts and the plant’s vulnerability to frost, the family has learned to harvest early to ensure good pumpkin selections.

In addition to the big maze, the ranch offers a hay bale maze for kids, a shelled corn pit, hay bale slide and hamburgers and brats that come from ranch-raised beef and pork.

As with the Casper maze, the ranch hosts field trips for students during the week and is open to the general public on weekends. Gallagher estimates 10,000 to 15,000 people visit each year from the Cody, Powell and Red Lodge communities.

“We get a lot of people who come down from Billings,” she said.

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.