By Kristen Hannum –
Greg Gallavan
Surely everyone — at least once in their lives — has considered the terror of being lost in a cave, wandering through dark, endlessly winding, mazelike tunnels, hopelessly unable to find the way out.
No wonder people doubted Greg Gallavan when he decided to launch a business premised on the idea that if you replaced darkness and desperation with blue skies and the promise of getting out alive, mazes would be fun.
“Don’t forget the prizes, the competition to see who can get through the fastest,” he adds.
Indeed, visitors aren’t just racing through to the end; rather, like geocaching where participants find a hidden object by means of coordinates, they have to find checkpoints along the way in order to register their times.
The idea proved laughably workable, and Colorado’s own maze kingdom, Amaze’n Mazes, founded as Amaze’n Ventures in 1988 in Winter Park, is now going stronger than ever.
Some mazes include a high ropes course built above the ground-level human maze.
Visit a maze and you’ll still hear people sighing, although not all that unhappily, “I’m lost.” Or you might hear the woman in pink sneakers and jeans laughingly telling her hapless guy, “I’m not following you anymore!”
“Go, go, go!” is also a frequent phrase with all the sprints for prizes and the chance to post the fastest time out of the maze. But even with the mazes’ appeal to the competitive side of visitors, giggles and all-out belly laughs are just as common.
The Amaze’n Ranch Roundup at Natural Bridge Caverns is a one-of-a-kind maze experience and was built to honor five generations of ranch ownership history in the Natural Bridge Caverns family.
The mazes post the fastest time of the day on a painter’s board outside, and sometimes kids go through enough times that they shave minutes off their time each run, getting down from about 12 minutes (the average at many of the mazes) to three or four minutes.
Gallavan’s creations are a definite threat to mazes’ age-old aura of mystery and dread.
But even fun mazes, according to Gallavan, have a checkered past. “They’ve come and gone,” he says.
Amaze’n Mazes is so far an exception. These days Gallavan flies to one construction site after another. During the first week of May he oversaw getting a new Amaze’n Maze up in Hyland Hills, in the Westminster area northwest of Denver. He is the point man to answer questions while checking on safety items and ensuring the engineering is done right for the plastic walls, as well as giving last-minute instructions for the crew.
The Wet Maze located in Singapore features an elevated ropes course.
In mid-May he did the same thing in South Korea. “I’ve had one day off in four or five weeks,” he says.
The work has paid off. There are now 55 Amaze’n Mazes around the world, most of them in the United States but also in Asia, the Caribbean, Australia, Canada and Europe. They’re made of plastic panels that, like Lego® pieces, can be taken apart and put back together differently.
The mazes are an oddity in this GPS era where all the driver has to do is follow a disembodied voice’s gentle instructions on which way to turn. The mazes also demand effort, unlike destination amusement park rides where all the customer has to do is stand in line and then sit still in a spinning cup.
At Amaze’n Mazes people pay good money in order to get lost and do all the work themselves to find their way out. “It’s an active game,” Gallavan says. “And if they do it in good time, they win prizes. It’s really good for families.”
In 2012, the company began adding water elements to some of the mazes in hot climates, and then in 2015, two parks opened with ropes courses in place over the maze itself.
In warm climates, Amaze’n Mazes are turned into aqua mazes with a variety of water features.
Pardon the expression, but Gallavan seems slightly amazed by it all. He never planned to be in the maze business. His father, Pat Gallavan, a Durango native, worked for the city of Denver for more than 30 years as director of Denver Mountain Parks, manager of the Denver Zoo and then deputy manager of parks.
Greg Gallavan also loves the outdoors. “I just wanted to be outside,” he says. So he went to Colorado State University and studied forestry. He hadn’t put it together until after he graduated that the only thing his degree prepared him to do was to work for the government, which was not one of his goals. “I wanted to work in campgrounds,” he says, still sounding slightly surprised, 40 years later, that he missed that government part of his career path.
It was about 1976 and Gallavan took Colorado’s classic path toward the ski industry instead. He became food and beverage manager for Winter Park, helping earn the Lodge at Sunspot a five-star rating.
Meanwhile, mazes built with wooden walls became popular in Japan, and a Japanese businessman opened one, the Wooz, in Vacaville, California. Gallavan went to see it for himself and when he returned home he launched Amaze’n Ventures and opened Amaze’n Burger in Fraser in 1988, thinking it might be a prototype for restaurant mazes.
“We found out inside mazes aren’t the best, because you can always place yourself to the ceiling,” he says. And besides, he was ready to say goodbye to working in restaurants.
In 1990, Amaze’n Breckenridge opened. Gallavan found his life’s work: building outdoor mazes.
His first mazes were built of wood, but the company soon began using plastic panels, which were durable and easier to work with.
The new water elements and ropes courses are transforming the mazes. In Singapore, a maze that opened in 2015 atop a six-story building incorporated both water and ropes.
Instead of standing in line waiting their turn to get harnessed for the ropes course, families can run the mazes below wobbly ropewalkers above. After the ropes were added to the maze in Golden*, the course’s business more than doubled.
An aerial view of Amaze’n Mazes in Winter Park and Greg Gallavan (center, in blue shirt).
“We were surprised,” Gallavan admits.
But the ropes courses also bring in school districts and police departments, which use the ropes courses for team-building exercises.
Gallavan’s own favorite maze is the Fort Where-Am-I Maze, which opened in Glenwood Springs in 2008. It’s a “cave and maze combo” that’s part of the Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park.
Despite recent hectic weeks of building mazes, Gallavan, now 64, is giving himself more days off. At one time he owned four of the nine Colorado mazes. He’s now down to one, the maze at Steamboat Springs. “I act like I have to go to work there, but really Steamboat is one of my favorite places in the summer,” he says. “You can find me camping.”
And in the winter?
“I live in Winter Park, so I’m totally spoiled,” Gallavan says. “I’ve got a lifetime season pass [to Winter Park Resort]. I love that panoramic view from 13,000 feet, any day I want to see it.”
In other words, Gallavan is enjoying an amaze’n last laugh on all his doubters.
Kristen Hannum is a Colorado native who makes her living writing and editing for magazines and newspapers, although she enjoys the thought of getting out and getting lost in a maze of fun.
*The Golden maze, Miners Maze Adventureland, was relocated to Hyland Hills in Westminster and re-opened this summer.