[gentle guitar music]
[goats bleating]
- Treinen: So, in 2021, it'll be a hundred years in the family.
- Angela: Alan Treinen has more than a century of farming
running through his veins.
- Since I was that big, I knew I wanted the farm.
- Angela: The Treinens also knew
they wanted to save and share
their rural Wisconsin heritage.
- We started to think
that maybe the whole business could be more.
It could help the farm stay in the family.
[upbeat music]
- Child: A horsey! - Go, horsey, go!
*
- Angela: The Treinens opened their first corn maze
in 2001.
[indistinct chatter]
- Angela: In 20 years,
it's grown into one of the top 10 corn mazes in the country,
according to USA Today readers.
- Angie Lathrop Trienen: So, we've done the Trilobite,
which is the state fossil of Wisconsin.
One year, we did the Kraken.
So, we've done a lot of, like, mythology,
like Greek mythology, Icarus, Athena.
We've done stories like Aesop's Fables,
story of, like, how the elephant got his trunk.
- Alan Treinen: The elephant's child maze, not my favorite.
That was a bugger to catch.
No straight lines.
You got to lay out every inch of that maze.
- Angela: In 2020, this is the design Angie dreamed up.
It's a creature, half a millimeter long,
known as the "water bear."
- They are really weirdly, ridiculously cute
under the microscope.
They have a funny little snout,
pudgy little eight legs with the little claws on them.
They look like a teddy bear crossed with a caterpillar.
The toughest thing is just finding a theme
that kinda fulfills all the things I need it to be.
Interesting, beautiful, will make a good maze.
I actually spend a few months thinking about it,
but I don't really start it
until my husband plants the corn.
And then, I have a 10-day window to get the design done.
- I plant the field lengthwise and crosswise,
so as soon as the corn's out of the ground and inch-tall,
I've got a grid growing in the field.
- When you see Angie's complex and elaborate design,
it's no wonder visitors ask one question
more than any other.
- A lot of people wanna know how we cut the maze.
They're walking in corn that's like 10 or 12 feet tall
and wondering how on earth we would cut it.
- Angela: That would be Alan's job
to take Angie's seed of an idea
and transform the landscape
when the corn is only a few inches high.
- Alan: Everybody assumes we use GPS,
and they're surprised when I tell them,
"No, we use a grid."
And we mow the trails initially,
and then we have to come with a tractor and a rototiller.
Favorites are the ones that are easier to cut.
- Angela: "Easy" is not a part of Angie's mantra
when it comes to her mind and the maze.
- Angie: First of all, they're surprised
at how big the corn maze is.
When I say it's 15 acres,
which is just short of 15 football fields,
sometimes they're like, "Whoa, whoa,
five to six miles of trails in there."
[gentle music]
- Angela: As a maze designer,
she's up to the challenge to figure out
ways for you to get lost.
It's all part of the mathematics in the maze.
- Angie: Every year, when I design it,
I have these ideas about
what parts of the maze are gonna be hard for people.
[indistinct conversation]
- Woman: We're entering number one.
Hope you guys know where you're taking me!
- Angie: One of my favorite mazes was a gecko,
and the gecko had a lot of mathematical concepts.
It had like a Fibonacci Spiral in the tail,
and Penrose tilings on its back.
I had put in these little hexagons.
I just kind of needed to fill up some space.
Everybody said the hexagons were super hard.
Who knew?
- Child: I'm right by the entrance.
[corn brushing]
- Found him!
- Man: There's two, there's three.
- So, I always ask people, "Well, did you get lost?
Did you get turned around?"
'Cause I feel like I'm not doing my job as a maze designer
if they say, "Nope, didn't get lost."
And that's a fun business to be in.
- Alan: It is turned into something I'd never imagined
it would have.
It turned out pretty good.