Sunday, 9 September 2012

Pitt Meadows Corn Maze

I have been wanting to go do a corn maze for a few years now but have always forgotten about it in the Fall season. Turns out, corn mazes are usually on for the whole summer as long as there's corn growing! 

A quick search on Google lead me to the website of the Pitt Meadows Corn Maze. For $12, this place offers the older population (like us) a 17-acre maze, a bee observatory (not available when we went), a petting zoo, pig races, the Lions Goat Bridge, and a haywagon ride. For the younger kids, they have a train ride and they can also pretend to be little farmers by picking fake fruits to deliver to a fake farmer's market. This place also has a corn cannon that you can play at $2 for 3 shots. Apparently you can win a small slurpee if you can hit the target. Totally worth the $2 by the way.

When we arrived, we received this card which contains the rules and the check-list of stations:

front


back

Basically we are supposed to find the stations in the maze and punch our cards in the appropriate spots. If you do manage to find all the stations, you get a free postcard that shows the maze of that year as a prize. As shown above, we did and got this~
the prize!
The maze was split into two sub-mazes, with the pig on the lower right hand corner being a separate, smaller maze. Took us about 2 hours to finish both mazes. One thing to note is that the WHITE lines are the paths, not the green ones outlined by the white lines! This was confusing initially because traditional mazes on paper is designed the other way around. Here are some pictures of the maze:



There is an elevated bridge underneath the big circle in the middle of the map, and that's where you can take pictures and go back to whenever you are lost. The corn stalks are actually taller than 6 feet! Here's also a good picture of the corn maze from Google's Satellite view from the year 2008:



Some tips for doing the maze:
  • The maze was huge, so you should wear comfortable shoes and proper clothing.
  • It was fairly dry this year, so it got very dusty. Should have worn shorts and sandals. They do provide a washing station for your legs.
  • Bring lots of water.
  • Bring sunscreen.
  • Bring a hat if you can't stay in the sun for too long.
  • Bring a phone? In the worst case scenario that you cannot finish the maze.
  • Bring a camera.
  • Perhaps also bring something to eat.
Mr. Lilasaur and I forgot to ask the staff how the maze is made. I suspected that the maze is drawn on the field ahead of time and the corns were planted accordingly, but turns out the general practice was what Mr. Lilasaur suspected - they plant a whole field of corn then PLUCK THEM OUT according to a design. Still doesn't make sense to me but that's what Youtube told us. Here's a video, courtesy of stromsfarm:


Other things that we also enjoyed were the petting zoo and the pig races. There were rabbits, goats, donkeys, and chickens in the petting zoo. There was this particular goat that totally invaded our private space and licked us while we were petting the donkey, hahaha. In one of the pig races, if you volunteer to be the "team lead" and cheer for the piglet that is assigned to your team (divided by the staff), you get to keep the pig nose that you have to wear when cheering! :D

No comments:

Post a Comment