The minds behind Lingle-based pumpkin patch Ellis’ Harvest Home plot out a corn maze each year, blaze its paths with weed-kill chemicals and send giddy visitors into it to get lost.
Sometimes, the maze makers have to send in a drone to help hapless wanderers.
Dan Ellis is better known by his nickname, “Pumpkin Dude.” His son Zack, the “Pumpkin Whisperer,” and wife Cheryl the “Snack Queen” are the minds behind Ellis' Harvest Home, which is recognized as Wyoming’s oldest pumpkin patch and corn maze.
Over the past 18 years, the Ellises have received visitors from all corners of the state and even some from as far away as Colorado and Nebraska who book hotel rooms for the night.
Their farm in Lingle, Wyoming boasts several exciting attractions, which Dan said keeps kids playing all day and into the night. Truck beds full of dry corn kernels act like sandboxes. Old wooden posts form swing sets, and kids bounce on a giant inflatable jumping pad.
Dan said he once witnessed a rowdy group of kids playing on his jump pad through a rainstorm. Another group of kids ran through his hay bale maze so many times that one of them fell asleep.
For grown-ups, there’s a paintball range, “farmer basketball” and a football throwing game, which the Ellises said is surprisingly more popular with middle school-aged girls than it is with boys.
Hundreds of socks and shoes get left behind, Dan said. Dan has also helped visitors search for everything from wedding rings to military dog tags that the corn beds swallowed.
On a crisp fall afternoon when the weather is fair, Dan estimates the farm will receive upwards of 1,000 visitors. Its all-time record for one day is 1,363.
Their coffee shop, the Bean Bin, will sell hundreds of drinks on one of these good days. Their Italian sodas are the most popular.
At their food stand, the Ellises churn out countless servings of chili, hotdogs and their famous caramel apple nachos. One season, they used up 80 pounds of hamburger meat just to make their chili, Cheryl said.
The farm is strictly harvest-themed. Parents of young children often thank Dan for leaving out some of the spookier haunted themes commonly associated with Halloween, he said.
It’s also a lot of work to maintain a haunted corn maze, he said.
Reveling in the excitement, the Ellises said they have no plans to stop any time soon.
“After all the years we do this, it’s still fun,” Dan says. “It hasn’t slowed down yet.”
Corn Maze
The main attraction on the farm is the corn maze, which takes on a different theme each season. This year, a family trip to Casper inspired their decision to cut a maze representing Bigfoot.
Dan said planning for the maze beings long before fall time when he conferences with a Utah-based company to prepare his corn fields. After he decides on a design, the company lays out his field in grids and marks where to spray chemicals which will kill corn stalks, creating a path.
While the attraction is geared toward kids, the Ellises host a yearly “adults night,” with live music and booze. Dan laughed while recalling the sight of drunken college students stumbling over to the jump pad.
“If they didn’t have a bad back before, they certainly did after that,” he mused.
This year’s maze isn’t too hard, Dan said. But in 2010, he made his field into an oil derrick with a pot of gold at its base.
Intersecting paths wove through the maze, funneling into a red herring section with a dead end. Only one tiny corridor alone led to the exit, and many visitors missed it.
“It was brutal,” Dan said.
Besides sending a drone in after the wanderers, the Ellises will relay instructions over the phone to guide visitors out of the trickiest sections of the maze. In rare cases, they will give permission for guests to push through the corn stalks for an easier escape.
In the years since the oil derrick, the Ellises focused on designs that don’t cause so much futility, like this year’s “Bigfoot.”
Only A Little Bit Outlaw
The Ellis’ first maze in 2008 skirted trademark restrictions around Wyoming’s bucking horse logo by cutting out the shape of a state quarter. While that image included the famous Steamboat logo, Dan said the university had no problem with it given that it couldn’t lay claim to the state’s currency.
In 2020, the corn maze gave a nod to the Coronavirus pandemic and its impact on toilet paper sales by cutting out the likeness of the Charmin bears. Dan said the company sent gift bags of toilet paper in thanks, which they gave out to guests who could correctly guess the bears’ names.
In 2024, the maze was made into a dog with a chicken on its head in honor of their dog Cooper who had just died. During his time on the farm, Cooper had greeted every guest and played fetch with thousands of children.
“He really was the best dog ever,” Cheryl said while recalling stories of children heaping corn kernels over Cooper.
Ugly, Warty Pumpkins
Over in the pumpkin patch, Zack showed off some of his ugliest specimens.
The Ellises grow over 30 varieties of pumpkins in their patch. Their most popular offerings, he said, are not the pristine Porcelain Doll or Cinderella varieties, but the “ugly” ones, such as Red Warty Thing, which is covered in hard knobs.
This year’s crop is among some of their best, Zack said. While the Ellises don’t try to grow giant pumpkins, such as the ones dropped from cranes in Worland, their all-time record weighed in at a not-too-shabby 114 pounds.
At the end of the season when pumpkins go out of style, Zack said they fence off the area and unleash their cows for a pumpkin feast. While their newest cows often don’t know what to do with a pumpkin, Zack said they quickly get a taste for it and begin fighting others for their share of the fall time delicacy.
For pumpkins that turn mushy and rotten, Zack scoops them into his excavator and dumps them in the pig pen. The pigs also love pumpkin, and devour it.
The Ellises’ farm dogs Walter, Hyde and Toby also enjoy pumpkin, but their favorite snack is hard corn kernels. They chew mouthfuls of the stuff out of the corn beds or sometimes just rip a cob straight off the stalk.
Then They Had A Kid
Dan said the farm has had some visitors who’ve visited it each of the 18 years it has been open. He said these repeat visitors are now passing the tradition onto their children.
“I always use the example, the first time they came out they weren’t married yet,” he said of one pair of repeat visitors. “The second year they came out they were married, then they had a kid in the third.”
“It’s fun and very rewarding to watch that,” he added.
Over the years Dan has seen school groups come on field trips, grandparents visit with their grandchildren and young families bring infants.
The most gratifying part is when visitors leave with a smile.
“It makes me think ‘I’m doing something right,” he said.
Where It is
Ellis' Harvest Home corn maze is located two miles west of Lingle on Hwy 26 or eight miles east of Ft. Laramie on Hwy 26. Look for the orange signs south of the railroad tracks. For more information call Dan: 307-532-1686 or Zack: 307-575-3059.
Jackson Walker can be reached at walker@cowboystatedaily.com.