Manitoba family believes they've created world's largest snow maze

Manitoba snow maze seeks to break world record A Manitoba family is hoping to break a Guinness World Record with a giant snow maze they spent weeks building on their farm.

A Manitoba family has created what they believe to be the largest snow maze anywhere in the world.

A Maze in Snow, as it’s called, opened to the public for the first time on Saturday.

The maze is located on a farm in St. Adolphe, Man., about 30 kilometres south of Winnipeg. The farm is well known around the area for A Maze in Corn, which it puts together every fall.

“We’ve always wanted to have a winter offering,” maze designer and co-owner Clint Masse told CTV Winnipeg.

Running a maze in the winter eliminates some of the obstacles Masse and his team have to deal with at other times of the year, including mud and mosquitoes.

It also creates unique challenges. It took nearly four weeks for the team to make enough snow to create the maze and put it all in place. Even then, they were only able to get a sufficient amount of snow by taking a lot of it from the manmade sliding hill they create every winter.

“There just [weren’t] temperatures low enough for us to actually make snow to fill it back up,” Masse said.

According to Guinness World Records, the largest snow maze in existence is the 1,696-square-metre maze at Fort William Historical Park in Thunder Bay, Ont.

Masse says A Maze In Snow is larger, although he doesn’t want to tip his hand as to how much larger until after the official measurement is made Feb. 10.

Navigating the maze isn’t just about getting from one end to the other. Participants are told to search for the five small fires burning inside the labyrinth. Depending on the day, rounding a corner may also put them face-to-face with an artist making snow sculptures.

Ken Yost and his two daughters saw the carvings and the fires during the hour or so they spent traversing the maze.

“There were a few good spots where you could go in circles for a while, chasing your kids and losing them,” Yost said.

“It was a great way to spend an afternoon outdoors.”

Masse says the Yosts’ time in the maze was about par for the course for the first day, although some faster times were recorded.

“If your short-term memory’s really sharp, then maybe it’s even faster than that,” he said.