There was a long period where I didn’t make mazes at all, maybe 10 years or so. How did you go from that to making mazes professionally? And then I thought, I could start making my own mazes, so I made a maze book for the entire third grade class. I solved them from front to back, finish to start.

When I was in second grade or third grade, my mom let me get one of the Highlights maze books. Michelle Boggess-Nunley How did you get into making mazes? Click to download a PDF of the Atlas Obscura maze! You can go up stairs, but not waterfalls, and you can’t cross rocks. We spoke with Boggess-Nunley about how she got into mazes, how you stay one step ahead of solvers, and what it was like to make a single maze-in public-for months. So we tapped her to create a downloadable new maze for Atlas Obscura to help us launch our new puzzles, based on some of the wondrous locations we feature-all of which are clickable in the downloadable PDF. Jacobs’s new book, The Puzzler), exhibitions such as ArtPrize2021, and commissions, including a wall mural maze outside a local restaurant.

Since putting out her first book of mazes in 2019, Boggess-Nunley’s worked on multiple other books (including A.J. The Grosse Pointe, Michigan-based artist now holds the Guinness World Record for the biggest hand-drawn maze-around 1,500 ft long, so large that it had to be photographed panoramically, wrapped around a soccer field, for the final submission. Michelle Boggess-Nunley moved from an office job to life as a professional artist a few years ago, which led her back to a childhood passion: hand-drawn mazes.

The hardest maze ever answer