Pie & Toasters along the CDT

I recently came across some photos I took of a quirky place on the Continental Divide Trail (CDT). I think the place and its story are worthy of a post. So I wrote the following post.

It was the middle of May in 2018 and I was roughly 300 trail miles from the Mexican border, walking north on the CDT. I was hiking along bits of single-track tread, jeep roads, and gravel roads that make up the trail in the cedar-dotted high desert of southern New Mexico. In an effort to reach the next town a day early, I needed to make 26 to 29 miles a day for three days. So I was hoofing it and walking long hours.

My goal was Pie Town, N.M. (Its real name.) A place legendary on the trail for two things. One was pie, of course! And the other was Toaster House. Wait! What?!

In 1981 Nita Larronde, her husband, and 5 children moved into a house in Pie Town. A house on a dirt road that was also the official route of the recently established CDT. A year later, a weary-looking man with a backpack was walking by her house. When asked where he was going, he told her he was hiking the CDT and she offered him water and invited him in to rest out of the sun. It was such an interesting experience that she resolved to offer similar kindness to future hikers.

Nita was true to her word and offered a bit of respite to the 20 or so thru-hikers that walked by every year. Fast forward several years and her kids are grown and gone, the number of hikers per year has grown to over a hundred, and Nita gets a new house in another part of town. But rather than sell the old one, she puts up a sign, “No one lives here anymore—Please come in and make yourself at home.” And they did.

There were a half dozen beds and a couple of couches, a big back yard for camping, a big open porch to get out of the weather. There was a kitchen for cooking, a washing machine, a bathroom and shower, and an address where hikers could have packages mailed to them. Hikers chipped in with what they could afford for upkeep and helped out doing odd jobs around the place. And even though the numbers of hikers grew and grew and grew, it just seemed to work. Nita had faith that people would do the right thing, and for the most part they did. And she was there to pick up the slack if needed.

I walked into Pie Town about 10 a.m. wondering if I would recognize Nita’s house. I had never seen a picture. And then, there it was, a house on the west side of the road with an overgrown cedar rail and wire fence adorned with dozens and dozens of toasters and other appliances. I had arrived at Toaster House. Why toasters? You might ask. Apparently, at some point, one of Nita’s kids took their broken toaster and hung it on the fence. Other folks in town added more to the fence, then hikers sent toasters, people from other towns brought other small appliances, and it just became a thing. It became known as, what else but, Toaster House.

I got cleaned up, did laundry, and joined a half-dozen other hikers for pie in one of the two (sometimes three*) restaurants in town. Now with two (sometimes three*) restaurants in town, how do you know which has the best pie? Science demands you sample several kinds of pie in each restaurant. So, that is what we did, for science! By the end of the research, we decided it was a tie, and no one was interested in any more pie. (* The third restaurant was only open intermittently.)

The next day was my 68th birthday and I was taking the day off, a “zero” day. Scatman, who lives 2 hours away, drove over and took me out to see the VLA Radio Telescope nearby and bought me a steak dinner. Now there’s a friend! We camped at Toaster House that night, and after breakfast the next morning, he drove home, and I started walking north on to new adventures.

Nita passed away in 2023, but she left Toaster House to “the CDT community.” So, Toaster House still exists, but the word is that the property has fallen on hard times. Without a force of nature like Nita to watch over the place, gradual decline unfortunately seems its destiny.