The Chatfield corn maze seems like it should be a ton of fun, right? You get to wander around and solve a maze while, presumably, hanging out with friends and enjoying the fall weather. Sounds like a wonderful time on paper. In reality, the maze didn’t really live up to my expectations.
But before we get to the letdowns of the maze, let me preface this with some good notes. The entrance to the corn maze and pumpkin patch was tastefully decorated and secluded. It really felt like entering what J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire could have looked like in real life, that is, if its residents were obsessed with autumnal weather and confusing mazes.
There was also a surprising amount of food and drink options outside of the maze. My friends and I only tried the funnel cake, but it was almost worth ten dollars due to its sheer size alone. Other foods on the menu seemed to be even less reasonably priced, which is expected from fairground food.
In what I can only assume was an attempt to make the maze feel unique, there were no dead ends. Instead, every path that wasn’t a way forward looped back in on itself and returned to the intersection it started at. This looping was incredibly unsatisfying, and it was much harder to keep a mental map of the maze because each path didn’t have an obvious end point.
Part of the frustration I felt in navigating the maze can be attributed to our intentional stupidity, we staunchly refused to take left turns for half of our time in the maze until we gave up on our dignity and abandoned the rule, but even when we did allow ourselves full freedom of choice in deciding on the way forward, I still had the hard to shake feeling that no matter what we did, we would end up back at the intersection we started at.
This problem was exacerbated by the fact that every intersection in the entire maze looked exactly the same, all just circles of large, dying stalks of corn with three or four offshoots. And that may seem like a basic fact of a corn maze, but they didn’t have to make the intersections quite so indistinguishable from one another. Throughout the maze, there were small cutouts of Colorado wildlife, a deer, elk, buffalo, and bear. Instead of being found at these intersections, the cutouts were scattered throughout the maze, which did very little to help with navigation. I don’t think it would have taken anything away from the experience if they had put them at major crossroads instead, as a visual indication either that one had just encountered a dead end path or that one had made a correct turn and didn’t have to retrace their steps.
It’s at this point that I must admit that neither I nor either of my friends who accompanied me truly finished the corn maze. Instead, we grew tired of the constant winding and unsatisfying lack of progress to the point where we began cutting through the corn. Eventually, when we had explored all of the conceivable pathways forward through the maze, we escaped the maze by cutting through the corn. So, the second half could have been much better than the first, although it’s unlikely.
So, in conclusion, the Chatfield corn maze isn’t nearly as much fun as it sounds like it should be, and I would say that the $14 admission fee was far too great for an experience as mediocre as it was.