For the next couple weeks, the ISU community will have the opportunity to get lost in a field of corn.

“The Maze,” located half a mile east of Interstate 35 on U.S. Highway 30, is a 12-acre walking maze cut into a corn field.

“There are well over three miles in paths,” said Debra Kearney, junior in agricultural education, who runs The Maze.

Dan Dennison, who has been running a similar maze in Knoxville for the last three years and helps his daughter, Kearney, run The Maze in Ames, said they have been planning this particular maze, depicting the ISU logo, since last November.

“Once we decided on a design, we bought the rights to use the logo,” Dennison said. “We hired a designer out of Utah to design the maze. When the corn was coming out of the ground, we drew the logo in the field, then took the corn out of the ground.”

He said it took them three days to cut out the paths for the maze.

Dennison said he got the idea for a maze when he was operating a greenhouse.

“I wanted to have a maze for kids while their parents shopped,” he said.

Dennison then saw another corn maze in Iowa, went through it and thought it was a very good idea.

“It’s a really fun activity,” he said, “a fun oriented thing.”

Before guests are let into the maze, they are given a passport, which is a card that has 10 questions on it, Kearney said.

These questions on the passport correspond to posts in the maze.

She said if the questions are answered correctly, it helps guests get through the maze, but if they answer the questions wrong, “they can get themselves really lost.”

“We comfort them by saying we won’t leave until all the cars are out of the parking lot,” Dennison said.

On average, it takes a guest an hour and a half to get through the maze, Kearney said. She said the fastest time through the maze was 25 minutes.

“They must have been running,” she said.

Beginning Friday, Kearney will turn the maze into a haunted house of sorts, called the “Haunted Maze.”

She said they will do this by marking a specific path through the maze for guests to take.

“It’s really easy to scare a person in a cornfield,” Kearney said. “Some people will turn a corner and scream because they saw a corn stalk when they were expecting to be scared.”

The Maze is open until October 31. It is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and from 1 to 6 p.m. Sundays. Adults are charged $6 and children charged $4. Students pay adult admission.

The Haunted Maze starts Friday, and is open from dusk until 11 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and every evening during the last week of October. Adults will be charged $8 and children charged $6. Information can be found by calling 233-5402 or at www.dandfarms.com.