Puzzle Mountain Bakery
Photo: Puzzle Mountain Bakery
Along a quiet stretch of road between Grafton Notch State Park and the ski slopes of Sunday River, a small roadside shed stands stacked with pies and homemade jam. There is no cash register, and there is no cashier. There's just a metal lockbox bolted near the stand, a handwritten price list, and the assumption that everyone who stops will pay for what they take by cash or Venmo.
It's an honor-system pie stand, and it's become one of the most beloved roadside stops in western Maine. Puzzle Mountain Bakery received the most nominations to the Maine Atlas, and we are delighted to highlight this clear state favorite!
Puzzle Mountain Bakery was founded in 1999 by Mary Jo Kelly, who began baking pies and setting them out along the road near her home in Newry. In 2010, her son Ryan Wheeler and his wife, Devon, took over the business, and they still run it today — waking before sunrise to bake in a small kitchen next to their house, then carrying the delicious goodies out to the roadside stand each morning.
By midday the shed is typically stocked with fruit pies in a rotating cast of around twenty flavors — wild Maine blueberry is the perennial favorite — alongside chocolate whoopie pies, maple-cream cookies, and several kinds of jam, most made with ingredients sourced from other Maine suppliers. Over the course of a season the Wheelers bake something like 3,000 pies by hand.
While black bears have occasionally helped themselves to pie (and yes, their favorite flavor is blueberry), its mostly hikers, skiers, and people who travel out of their way to find that pie stand in Maine everyone’s talking about. You can grab yourself a tasty treat from Thursdays – Mondays, Memorial Day through November.
