Organic farm builds giant bear-shaped maze

A giant grizzly bear can be seen prowling around Whitefish Stage Road, but there’s no need for concern. The bear is actually a massive straw bale maze, the latest creation by Whitefish Stage Organic Farms for its fall festivities.

“Obviously with a bear, it’s our local mascot here,” said farm owner Scott Lester. “I wanted to do something that kind of honored our local lifestyle.”

The maze uses 4,000 bales of straw, covers about an acre of land and took 200 hours to create.

Lester has been erecting straw mazes for the past three years at his 65-acre organic family farm in Kalispell, but he said “this one is the hardest one yet” to design. Previous designs included a tractor, a barn and silo, and a castle.

“I think this is going to be the hardest maze yet in terms of going through it,” he said.

Lester, who has been designing mazes since he was a child, starts the process with an outline and draws a maze inside it on graph paper. He then makes an approximation on the ground and uses drones to “fine-tune it until I’ve got the perfect image.

“Then we build it in earnest, once we’ve got the approximation fine-tuned, into a nice design,” Lester said.

It takes a team of 20 people — farm employees, subcontractors, friends and various local groups such as sports teams and youth groups — and two days of stacking to complete the maze. Lester explained, “We get a row of people in an assembly line and we build from the middle out.”

The 4,000 bales of straw come from neighboring wheat farms. “They don’t even have to drive on the road,” to deliver the bales, Lester said. “They literally just drive across the field. It couldn’t be more local.”

“A lot of people come not just from this community,” to go through the maze, Lester reported. Even though the farm doesn’t advertise beyond the local community, he said, “they come from Eureka, Missoula—it just goes viral.”

In addition to the maze, Whitefish Stage Organic Farms also has a number of family-friendly activities and fall-themed food and drink items available throughout the season. Activities include hay wagon rides, pedal carts, pumpkin bowling and more. “It’s something for the community to do to come out and have fun and create a memory,” Lester said.

He hopes to use the giant maze and the rest of the autumn events to “draw attention to the you-pick” strawberries and raspberries available during the summer, as well as “the fact we’re a community farm.”

Reporter Bret Anne Serbin may be reached at bserbin@dailyinterlake.com or 758-4459.