Discussion: 2018 US Corn Maze Championships

Ahoy mateys! The premier event for the year is fast approaching. No, not JWOC, not WOC. It's the 9th annual CMOUSA Championships. Hoist yer anchors, and batten down the hatches. Mark your map now, and reserve your passage.

Yes, 9 years of epic-ness. Shiver me timbers. Who will be next to reign as King and Queen? Who will be the next Guybrush Threepwood? The next Elaine? Who will be next to have their name chiselled into history!

Year	Maze	King	Queen
2017	Greetings From Earth	Ethan Childs	Pavlina Brautigam
2016	See America	Ian Smith	Isabel Bryant
2015	Alice in Sunderland	Ben Gallup & Joe Brautigam	Evalin Brautigam
2014	Animal Intelligence	Ian Smith	Alex Jospe
2013	The Dali~rama	Ian Smith	Barb Bryant
2012	The Sower's Banquet	Ian Smith	Alison Crocker
2011	Noah Webster	Marek Petrivalsky	Carol Walker
2010	Campbell's Soup Can	Greg Walker	Cristina Luis

Will Ian ever return from the great white north? Can Ethan defend? What dark voodoo secrets explain the Brautigam and Bryant dynasties? Who will impress with the best seadog costume? (All eyes look towards Barb.)

Yo Ho Ho. See you all soon. And so far the maze design is still secret ... heh, heh, most excellent.

It looks to me like Ian Smith is the Daniel Hubmann of US CMO. A force indeed.

j-man: Yes, Ian is clearly a corn maze master. And his streak would have been 5 in a row if not for whatever happened in the 2015 trail O... Shame he's not registered this year -- I suspect he would have made a fine looking Guybrush.

tRail O for the win in '15

I distinctly remember defeating Ian in 2016. I don't have the overall results, though.

Ethan by 10s in the classic, Ian by 3s in the Night. No results posted for the Sprint Shuffle or Trail-)

https://attackpoint.org/eventdetail.jsp/event_2895...

http://www.petergagarin.org/2016/overallcornresult...

http://www.attackpoint.org/discussionthread.jsp/me...

Appears the commissioner in 2016 invoked a secret tie breaker?

Ah fiddlesticks. I remember that now...

Rekt. But you won the races, and that matters more.

And just to put this out there, I did beat Ethan in the rerun of the Corn Maze in 2016. So I've got no official title, but bragging rights are a pretty big deal :)

I'm coming for you, Ethan!

Schedule (same as last year) has been posted. Entry deadline is Friday night (unless it fills up before then). Weather forecast is looking... pretty reasonable.

I'm definitely bringing a boat...

Bringing a boat? Why? Will there also be canoe-corn-O? If so, I'm in. :)

pirates!

Yeah. Arrrr! Maybe we should have scheduled this for September 19.

Arrrrrrrr you ready for this??

OMG that's awesome.

Part of it is even a map! That's so meta!

That has to be a first!

Nope.

USA.
North & South Carolina
Ohio
Michigan
Illinois
Australia
Georgia & Africa
Florida
Nebraska (sort of)

And then there's this one in Washington State that is the same state map maze each fall, since at least 1999 (perhaps further?). This one has additional props, like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Space Needle, several volcanoes, etc.

I think Guy means orienteering on a map with a map of the map may be a first.

Although in this case, the map on the ground may or may not actually be a map of anything real.

Start list posted to event page. Adjustments are possible if need be.

Stopped by the maze late this afternoon and things look good to go. Mike was making sure the arena was looking good --



The parking area had just been created --



And the maze, tall and lush, is ready --

I actually navigated the Washington maze at night one year. It was part of a puzzle hunt. https://mooncurser.info/

Another Corn Maze Champs is in the books. Awesome, as usual.

Overall winners for the women:
1. Pavlina Brautigam
2. Evalin Brautigam
3. Kristin Hall

And for the men:
1. Greg Ahlswede
2. Ethan Childs
3. Ben Gallup (appearing semi-incognito)

Map and courses from yesterday.

First up was the sprint. Note the excellent maze within the maze, complete with a larger scale version in the lower right part of the page. Course by Steve Richardson, just excellent (true for all the courses).



Next was the classic, aka redemption opportunity, which folks handled in different ways. For example, Tori, the current North American sprint champion, came in only second in the sprint in her personal duel with Carlo; in the classic she trounced him. Both competed early as they had a plane to catch out of Boston back to the Bay Area.

Or there was Phil, always in need of redemption when corn mazes are involved, and seemingly always denied. It appears that it's part of a ploy to get to be the mazemaster some year.



And then the night, wonderful as always, although some of us got way too few skips. But such is life sometimes.





In between there was a trail-O and dinner and other foolishness. And JJ applied the necessary brute force to the WCOC computer to produce results, legitimate results actually, with Greg Ahlswede and Pavlina Brautigam crowned as King and Queen of the corn.

Detailed results coming... before too long... got some computer gymnastics to do...

Another great edition of the Corn Maze Champs--thanks to all who made it happen, especially Steve for terrific courses. The maze-in-a-maze was a brilliant idea, especially challenging if one snuck in a bathroom break during the pre-course discussion and missed the info that there was a blowup of that portion in the margins.

And what a maze for orienteering. That beard....

Congratulations to GSwede and 2-time Corn Champion Pavlina! The maze and courses both look fantastic; I am chagrined I couldn't attend.

Pictures! https://evalinmae.smugmug.com/Corn-Maze-O-Champs-2...

Chagrined me too, or maybe that is not quite the right word in my case. Greetings from beautiful Laramie.

Now, if we could have transported Laramie's weather to Sunderland....

The cooler temps and low humidity has been nice. The maze looks incredible and I'm sure was a blast for all involved.

Lost & Found:
- One pair blue shorts.
- One pair of sandals.
- One flashlight.

Flashlight is mine. Shorts are Andrew Carlson's. Will you be at any of the upcoming NEOC events? Or pass them off to a CSU member at Pawtuckaway? I probably won't be there this time.

Splits are posted (I think I did everything right), full scoring table yet to come.

Is it possible that night-O control 6 (#33) was flakey? I didn't skip it but it's missing from my printout as well as from the posted results. Counting me there are 6 people with "mp" result who are missing this one (me, Tor, Pia, Gail, Phil, Susan). And my printout isn't showing that I punched some other control by mistake. Are all 6 of us missing one more than our allowed # of skips?

Good question, I don't know. It definitely worked for a lot of people. Among the ones that you list:
Mitch: skipped 6/5
Tor and Pia: skipped 7/5, though Pia said when they were downloading that they might have skipped too many (but maybe she only thought they skipped one extra?)
Gail: skipped 8/7
Phil: skipped 9/8, but he says in his log that he skipped #6 because he got lost trying to find it
Susan D: skipped 11/6
Also
Jackson: skipped 8/8, including #6
Nancy: skipped a lot
It does look like a control that could have been considered worth skipping.

Never mind. Looks like the flakey one was me. From my gps track it's pretty clear that I skipped #6, even if I didn't plan to.

From the results splits it looks like all the mp folks who were missing this one had started near or after me, so I'd wondered if maybe the earlier folks had worn down a marginal battery or something.

My splits show me skipping #19 but my track shows me distinctly in the mini-maze between #18 and #20. My intention from the start was to skip the last control just so I wouldn't lose track of what skip in the middle. My route was controls 1-28, in order, and out. So apparently not a MP after all...

{edit} upon closer inspection, it looks like I may have done #28 twice. Probably hit the maze for #19, switched over to looking at the old man version (which didn't have control numbers) and visited the wrong X first time through. Damn...

Exactly right. You punched control 55 at 26:49 instead of 37.

AP interprets carriage returns in table html as whitespace in the post. To get rid of the white space, change your table style from the top to the bottom:

<tr>
<td> stuff </td>
</tr>

Instead:
<tr> <td> stuff </td> </tr>

That's what I get for having Excel spit out HTML instead of just crafting it myself. Better than it was, but I guess I still have a few in there. And I must say I don't understand how it manifests itself as extra lines top and bottom, but whatever.

It's more concerning that Nate Collinsworth (e.g.) took 1515:34 on the classic course. Edit: now I realize that there is no space between the sprint places (15 for Nate) and the classic time (15:34).

Right. When I just open up the HTML, the spacing and alignment come out okay, but when I paste it into AP, not so much.

OK, I can add spaces to fix that. Later...

Quick and dirty fix is to add cellspacing="5" (e.g.) to the <table> tag, like <table cellspacing="5"> . It's technically not supported in HTML5, but it should work, I think.

I'm confused about my trail-o score because I did it but the table above doesn't show a score.

I don't think width is the problem. There's a left-justified column following a right-justified one, despite the fact that they're both supposed to be right.

Sorry about that, Bridget, we might have lost data. I don't know what happened to the scoring sheet that Steve gave me (I typed it in that night, but I might have missed you). I'll ask Steve if he still has the maps.

Lost - A rental SI dibber, aka SI stick, #2080605, is missing from the kit used at the Corn Maze. Please look through your gear for anything extra. Contact me at contact info.

That one was assigned to Ed Despard. We did try pretty thoroughly to police up the registration area, but it is possible that he returned it and we somehow missed it (fell on the ground or whatnot). I didn't do as good a job as I should have at having an accounting system for those.

Trail-O results found. Will update the table tomorrow.

I have it. Ken and I skipped the night-o and went home from Bubs.

Trail-O results
Control #4 (the northernmost one) was not included in the scoring total, because the balloon made a break for it in the middle of the competition, and was last seen speeding past South Sugarloaf, so it wasn't there for the later groups. Due to the wind, all of the balloons were hard to see, only bobbing into view occasionally. The bonus column is for coming down from the viewing platform with time left from the five-minute time limit.

The overall scoring table above has been updated with some corrections from the Trail-O. The main difference seem to be that PG beat me.

name	#1	#2	#3	(#4)	bonus	total
Gail Richardson	5	1	0		3	9
Pavilina Brautigam	0	0	5		4	9
Greg Ahlswede	3	1	0		4	8
Kristin Hall	1	3	0		3	7
Ellen Morse	0	5	0		2	7
Nathan Collinsworth	3	0	0		3	6
Lucas Lyons	0	0	3	5	3	6
Sam Levitin	1	0	0		4	5
Ethan Childs	1	1	1	5	2	5
Ken Walker	0	3	0		2	5
Lukas Webb	0	1	0		4	5
Peter Gagarin	1	0	0		3	4
Joe Brautigam	1	0	0		3	4
Nancy Duprey	1	0	0		3	4
Clinton Morse	0	0	0		4	4
Bridget Hall	1	0	0		3	4
Andrew Carlson	1	0	1	5	2	4
Craig Weber	1	0	0	1	3	4
Keegan Harkavy	0	0	0		4	4
Ed Despard	0	0	0		4	4
J-J Cote	0	0	0		3	3
Anna Morse	1	0	0		2	3
Mitch Collinsworth	1	0	0		2	3
Ari Silverfine	0	0	0		3	3
Ann Marie Mador	0	0	0		3	3
Hayden Morse	0	0	0		3	3
Sue Worthington	1	1	0	1	1	3
Ben Gallup	1	0	0	5	2	3
Adam Miller	0	0	0		3	3
Guy Olsen	1	0	0	1	2	3
Michael Lyons	0	0	0	1	3	3
Adam Caplan-Bricker	0	0	0		2	2
Evalin Brautigam	0	0	0	3	2	2
Brad Harkavy	0	0	0		1	1
Rick DeWitt	0	0	0	1	1	1
Susan DeWitt	0	0	0	5	1	1
Keith Durand	0	0	0		1	1
Jackson Codd	0	0	0		1	1

Suggestion for future USCMOCs ("Corn Maze Nationals"?)...

Have the trail-O after the party (ie, Bubs). Rationale...
Getting to Bubs earlier would allow us to get back to the maze more quickly, because we would (presumably) beat the crowds. It has certainly worked in the past...

Yeah that's good. Trail-O in the dark. For most people, their scores would be about the same.

(For the second year in a row, I went to a different dining establishment where there was nobody there except the people at my table.)

Does the skips column indicate the allowed number of skips or the actual skips? I may well have skipped 9 instead of 8 so I can believe a DNF.

I may have picked up the wrong thumb compass. My memory is that the compass I had had a clear border, but the one I have now has a maroon border.

On a similar note, I seem to have misplaced my dibber: 419077. Does anyone have it?

Skips column is skips allowed. Skips taken can be seen by looking at the splits.

For those CMOUSA members who are sad to see the season ending, you're invited to extend your O'Hare layover for the next month, and enjoy Chicago's First Corn Maze only a few blocks from Michigan Avenue and the Water Tower! And hidden inside the maze is a Beer Garden!

What other clubs are having races in corn mazes this year?

I know CascadeOC has one tomorrow (our 7th annual). RMOC and MNOC have some, too, I think?

MNOC has had them for at least 5 or 6 years. Coming up October 6. Ours is always in the morning, before the place opens to the public, and the ticket is then good for the rest of the activities at Sever's Corn Maze.

Szalay's Farm corn maze used in Python #Rogaining adventure race by @NEOOrienteering #CVNP#CuyahogaValley#CornMaze#Orienteering#MazeMap pic.twitter.com/YjKzQ5Pknn

— West PA Orienteering (@wpaorienteering) October 12, 2018

RMOC's Corn Maze meet will be tomorrow (10/13), at Rock Creek Farm in Broomfield, CO. It's a Maze Play location, so they already have maps and control markers with punches in the maze -- we just have to show up and record start / finish times.

2018 maze:

The Maze Play mazes look really nice! There are now 7 of them in western Washington, including one just up the road from the corn maze that we go to, Bob's Corn Maze & Pumpkin Farm.

The maze we use is designed on graph paper, so it's nothing fancy, but it does make it easy to make an orienteering map. I usually just ask the farmer for a scan of his graph paper, but this year they posted a drone video on their Facebook page, and I just took a screenshot of that instead.

Here's the RouteGadget of our event from September 22, which was opening day at their Fall Festival. In the 7 years that we've been coming here, the Fall Festival is getting increasingly more popular, especially in October, so we try to schedule our race earlier so that we can take advantage of both lower attendances and partaking in all of the other stuff going on post-race.

Our corn maze race is part of CascadeOC's fall Choose Your Adventure Series, which is a series of non point-to-point events. For this one there's a map exchange involved: enter the maze and get 101-112, come back out, enter the maze and get 113-124.

One new thing we tried this year was a mass start. Due to crop rotation, Farmer Bob moved the corn maze about 350 meters east of where it's been the last several years. We used the same staging area as before, and kept the start there. We had a mass start, and by the time everyone got to the maze entrance, they were effectively strung out enough so that there weren't any logjams of people.

The winner this year was a Brit living in Vancouver, and it was his first time ever in a corn maze, let alone a race in one!

Here's our list of Kings and Queens from the, uh, Northwest Corn Maze Champs?

Year	Maze	King	Queen
2018	Country Store	Ben Smith (UK)	Julie Cassata
2017	35 Years*	Jourdan Harvey (NZ)	Julie Cassata
2016	Fire Pit	Eric Jones	Rebecca Jensen
2015	Barn & Silo	Nikolay Nachev	Ing Uhlin
2014	Bob's Corn Logo	Eric Jones	Gina Nuss
2013	Bee & Honeycomb	Nikolay Nachev	Gina Nuss
2012	Tractor	Nikolay Nachev	Gina Nuss

* 35 years of the farm having a Fall Festival. The "130 Years" reference in the 2018 maze is how long the Ricci family has been farming in the Snohomish River valley. The "15 Years" reference in the in 2015 maze is how long they've had a corn maze.

Still haven’t received the missing SI stick. Please return.

LAOC's Corn Maze event is tomorrow at Big Horse Corn Maze in Temecula. It's our 3rd year there.