Gigantic pumpkin

Gigantic pumpkin
Three-year-old Madeleine Rogers stands inside the spooky remains of a 275-pound pumpkin grown by her father, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center engineer Reggie Rogers. Since this photo was taken in 1999, both Madeline and the pumpkins have grown bigger; this year, the sacrificial squash at the center of his Halloween display weighed in at 521 pounds.

Carving a jack-o-lantern out of a giant pumpkin isn't easy. The top of the pumpkin, which is traditionally used as the opening, is too thick to cut. So Rogers used his engineering skills to construct a special tool that cuts through the thinner back side of the pumpkin, where the wall is still about a foot thick. "Then you use a shovel to scrape it out," says Rogers. "When my daughter was young enough, she used go on the inside and scrape out the rest."

Rachel Courtland 

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