Bumper crop of fun at area corn mazes

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"Catch the maze craze" breathlessly urges a sign near the popular maze at Temple Hall Farm Regional Park in Loudoun County, a few miles north of Leesburg. The mazes it's shouting about are the ones cut in big fields of 10-foot-tall corn at farms found these days all across America and in a few foreign countries as well.

They do amount to what might be called a craze. Each weekend, thousands of children and their parents visit Temple Hall Farm and sample at least part of the four miles of paths that make up its 11-acre "Welcome Back Joe" corn maze. The maze is in the shape of a football field along with a portrait of Redskins head coach Joe Gibbs.

Similar numbers of Washington-area folks flock each weekend to Virginia and the Corn Maze in The Plains (designed this year as a huge monarch butterfly) in Fauquier County, to Maryland's Forrest Hall Farm and Orchard in St. Mary's County (whose maze is a large, old-fashioned locomotive commemorating a train that ran year ago to a nearby depot), and to the many other mazes found on farms and nearby sites in the Washington exurbs and southern Pennsylvania.

Not only are the mazes springing up all over, they're also more popular than ever. "This is the best year ever. People keep coming," says Joseph Wood of Forrest Hall Farm and Orchard, who switched over from tobacco farming to a corn maze five years ago.

Similar reports come from Hub and Kate Knott (who recently added more games for children because of demand) at the Corn Maze in the Plains and from John Moore at Temple Hall Regional Farm Park.

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A walk through a corn maze might take 45 minutes or so, if you don't take a wrong turn. Then it will take a bit longer depending on your wits and luck. They're like puzzles that need solving, and a successful maneuver through complex pathways offers challenge, as well as fun.

But corn mazes aren't the only fun these places provide. There are hayrides -- rides on bales of hay stacked on a cart pulled by a tractor -- and "corn boxes," sandboxes filled with shucked dry corn, rather than sand.

Visitors can gather their own pumpkins from large-sized pumpkin patches. Farm animals to see and pet (if touching is permitted) come in an amazing variety, from cows and goats to chickens, ducks, and turkeys.

Often the livestock is exotic. Temple Hall Farm has Kavi, the kissing llama, and Silkie chickens with feathers on their feet as well as their bodies.