October is the one time of year when puzzle buffs can put down their pencils and take to the fields, plotting their way through corridors of corn.

Sneakers replace slippers as adventurers navigate their way through life-sized mazes of rustling stalks instead of those completed on paper.

From the ground, most corn mazes look the same: footpaths that wind through identical scenery.

But a bird’s eye view reveals a variety of sizes and shapes, with designs ranging from dragons to space ships to Disney characters.

Some mazes are haunted and made from scratch by enterprising farmers. Others are designed by professionals, who package them with games and puzzles whose clues can be found inside the maze.

Ranging from innocent daytime strolls for toddlers to haunted adventures on larger spreads, the mazes offer an outdoor experience for different tastes and ages.

One of the county’s largest mazes can be found at the Hotel Beacon in Forward Township.Spread over 10 acres, the dragon-shaped labyrinth can be accessed outside the hotel, where visitors board a hay wagon pulled by tractor to the entrance.Once there, passengers are greeted by the head of a dragon — fiery breath included — looming overhead near the puzzle’s portal.Although most Beacon visitors tour the maze during nighttime hours, visitors are discouraged from taking flashlights with them, said Debra Krelow, a Beacon owner. “It kind of takes all the fun out of it. It’s all the element of surprise,” she explained.Surprises are created by a troupe of Halloween ghouls who jump out at walkers from strategic points.Peter Crist, a former employee at the Beacon who has designed the mazes since they began several years ago, said the first attempt involved simply a machete and a field of Sudan grass — but more complexity emerged as the bartender-turned-engineer started to experiment.Creating the mazes with Beacon owner Greg Krelow, Crist said subsequent projects became more intricate: a lighthouse in 2003 and a farmer pulling a wagon the following year.“I decided I needed a bigger canvas,” Crist said of the current size, which nearly doubled with the 2004 creation.This year’s dragon includes about 6,000 feet of path, layered with wood chips to offset the mud on rainy days.The attraction is open to nighttime visitors, as well as on Sunday afternoons for those seeking a tamer venue.Designed primarily to amuse those on their feet on the ground, Crist noted, the aerial view has also gained attention.“Last year some US Air pilots claimed they could see this coming into the Pittsburgh airport. I was surprised it was visible from a commercial airliner,” he said.

To create a maze, Crist and other designers say they begin with an ordinary sketch on graph paper.A larger grid is then created on the cornfield, usually at planting time.In Crist’s case, the grid was made by pacing off the acreage and marking the grid with flags. Using surveying techniques to establish a baseline, Crist said he improvised by using the scope of a rifle instead of professional surveying tools.Once the field is staked with flags, Crist uses a baseball chalker to draw the design — a task that relies solely on his eye and the graph paper sketch.“Then I go up in an airplane and take pictures of it,” Crist said, explaining he can then see if major mistakes occurred in the “drawing.”Although the design encompasses 10 acres, Crist said the drawing took into account visibility in the maze, as well as the amount of time visitors are willing to spend, which he estimates to be about 45 minutes.“I take into consideration how the corn grows,” he said, explaining the stalks are planted on 30-inch centers, or about 3½ feet apart. “A lack of density makes it too easy,” he said, explaining parallel portions of the footpath must be separated by enough corn so as not to be visible from other points in the maze.Conversely, Bill Beinlich of Triple B Farms in Monongahela has recently reduced the size his maze, which has been offered to the public since 2001.“For the first three years it was a little over 4 acres,” Beinlich said. “We found it was just too big. People didn’t want to do it. It took too long.”The previous 1½-hour timeframe has been trimmed to less than an hour, he said.Although he creates the maze in much the same manner as Crist, Beinlich uses paint instead of chalk to identify his pathways.Both remove corn from the paths when it is about knee-high.“We used a rototiller the first year, but it was easier to do it by hand (with a shovel or hoe),” Beinlich said. “It doesn’t take that long. It sounds worse than it is. I usually have four to five people doing that part — we’ll be done in a half a day.”Beinlich said instead of using a scale drawing to construct their mazes, some builders also mount a global positioning system on their tractors, relying on technology to tell them where the footpath should go.Although he now builds the mazes himself, Beinlich’s early mazes were built with the help of a professional company. But income from the maze didn’t justify paying for those services, he said.“I can get on the computer and figure out how to do a design myself. After the first year you know what to do anyway — so it’s not a problem.”Beinlich estimated about 4,000 people come through his maze each year.Similarly, Krelow said last year’s visitors numbered more than 3,000, but based on a steady increase, she expects about 5,000 this year.Although both maze owners concur the projects take effort to complete, neither can pinpoint exactly how many man-hours are required to complete the project.“That’s always been a topic of discussion,” said Beinlich’s wife, Sue. “And honestly and truly, we can’t come up with the number of man-hours. From start to finish, it probably takes two weeks’ time. Some days we have one or two (people working), some days five or six.”

Although corn mazes have become an agri-tainment staple around the nation, the trend began with Don Frantz, who currently operates The American Maze Co. in New York City.Frantz, a Hershey native, said his first maze in 1993 gained national attention when he constructed it on about 3½ acres at Lebanon Valley College in Annville.That maze broke the world’s record for the largest corn maze, he said. More of his corn mazes beat world records in 1995 and 1996, he said.The 1995 maze, a sailing ship created in Shippensburg, was featured on “Good Morning America,” as well as on National Public Radio and in the New York Times.“It was a phenomenon story, kind of like one of the top stories of the week,” Frantz said.“A bunch of farmers (then) came to our various mazes and they went into their own towns and cities and states. Some of them asked for our help and some of them took what they could from us, and the fad (emerged). After five years I thought it peaked. After 10 years it was four times as big — and it just continues to grow.”Frantz said the company currently has mazes in England, France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, as well as various spots around the United States.Functioning something like a franchise, the company receives a fee for its initial services, then receives a royalty on admissions. The fee ranges between $4,000 and $12,000, depending on how much the farmer can do himself.This year, Franz has teamed up with the Disney Co. to create a series of mazes to promote the Nov. 4 movie release of “Chicken Little.”“There are 10 farms across the country involved in it,” he said, explaining McDonald’s is also among the promotional partners.“It’s fun because ‘Chicken Little,’ of course, is about the small guy. It’s quite fun to think about the entertainment giant teeming up with 10 family farms across the country,” he said.Another maze company, Maize Quest, began offering a corn maze in York County in 1997. Two years later, it expanded to build mazes for other farms.“This year we have 29 locations, all over the world,” said maze master Hugh McPherson.McPherson said a maze’s success depends on the farm’s location, the farmer’s attitude about visitors and the ability to hold the public’s interest.A farm should be near a populated area while still offering scenic, open space as a destination, he said.Farmers should also embrace the idea of many visitors at their sites.“You have to be jazzed about having a lot of people at your farm. If that doesn’t get you excited, if that gets you worried, you probably shouldn’t do it,” he said.Perhaps the most important factor, McPherson and Frantz agreed, is the farmers’ ability to keep visitors entertained and to keep them returning in subsequent years.This year’s Maize Quest theme, for instance, is the Ice Age, offering several activities to be completed while inside the maze.Activities include doing crayon drawings, finding answers to questions about the Ice Age and using special decoder glasses to gain information positioned at various sites in the maze.“The novelty of walking through the corn wears out fast. You have to try harder than just mowing down corn stalks,” McPherson said.“Most mazes target ages of 6 to 14. It’s a big demographic. … The good places try to provide a breadth of activities that will entertain the whole family.”Aside from occupying members of the public and diversifying farm properties, agri-tainment also offers a way for farmers to increase profits beyond those possible with just field crops and other farm commodities.But some creative do-it-yourselfers are motivated by the satisfaction of completing the project.“Building a fire-breathing dragon, that would be a really neat thing to do,” Crist said. “And since I have an occasion to do it, (I do).”