A-mazing




 

 

A cornfield not far from Edgerton has the state of Minnesota carved into it with all 87 counties delineated.

The maze is the artistic creation of Seth and Randy Spronk of Edgerton.

This is the fourth year the father-son duo have designed and cut their own pattern into a cornfield just outside Edgerton to benefit the Rock River Pumpkin Festival that takes place this year on Saturday, Oct. 1.

The corn maze opens to festival-goers on that day and thereafter, to the general public for the month of October, according to Denise DeKam at Southwest Minnesota Christian (SWC) High School, the primary organizer of the event.

The idea for the image of this year’s corn maze popped into Seth’s head during a brainstorming session. Getting that idea onto the field was a lot trickier. The two have gotten faster, cutting, as a general rule, 1-2 miles of maze path across 1-2 acres of field, but, “This is one of the more complex mazes we’ve done,” Seth said, due to the number of individual paths required to create 87 distinct counties.

“Technologically daunting” is one of the ways Seth described the designing process, which can be vastly oversimplified by stating he uses three different software components to design and geo-reference the image, before taking it to the field on a skid-steer’s GPS. From that point on, “I just turn on the air-conditioner and find a good radio station,” he said.

The Spronks create the maze not because they’ve got a bunch of spare time.

“It’s a benefit for the community and local schools,” Seth said.

The Rock River Pumpkin Festival, now in its eighth year, began with an educational opportunity presented by Greg Dyk, the school’s ag science teacher.

“He invited school kids and had a dairy cow and talked about corn and pumpkins and it just kind of spring-boarded from there into this much larger event,” DeKam said.

Initially intended as a fundraiser, the Rock River Pumpkin Festival “isn’t a large fundraising event,” DeKam said, in that it doesn’t quite pay for itself. “So it’s more of an Edgerton awareness event.”

The one-day event has drawn more than 1,100 people each of the past two years a trackable number, given the $2 admission-fee bracelets that are sold for a jam-packed day that begins with a Pumpkin Fun Run Walk, and ends with a pumpkin-throwing contest for the King of Fling crown. In between, there’s a vendor fair, a kids’ carnival, a pulled pork meal, a pumpkin carving and decorating contest, a pie-eating contest, 4-H horse rides, a rock climbing wall, a petting zoo, laser tag, an apple and pumpkin dessert contest and, of course, a hayride through the downtown out to the corn maze and pumpkin patch.

“The corn maze is done, the pumpkins are doing well (around 400 in the patch), and in that aspect, we’re ready to roll,” DeKam said.

In 2007, the first year of the festival, the organizers awoke in the morning to an inch of snow on the ground. Since then, they’ve learned to plan an inclement weather date, this year of Oct. 15.

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