Every resort has a founding family, and Angel Fire has the LeBus family. But every resort also has a founding character, the person who did a little bit of everything in the first winters, when nothing worked quite as planned. At Angel Fire, that person was Bill Burgess, a ski instructor and advertising artist who arrived in 1966, before the new ski area had welcomed its first paying guest.
Click to see more photos of Bill Burgess — teaching, racing shovels, and making signs in Angel Fire's early years
Burgess was born on July 28, 1937, in Spokane, Washington, learned to ski on hand-me-down equipment at Mt. Spokane, and taught his first class there in 1955. In the Army he talked his way into a ski platoon that helped with the 1960 Winter Olympic Games at Squaw Valley, and he went on to earn Rocky Mountain ski instructor badge number 705. Angel Fire drew him, he later said, because it was the first place he could combine the two things he loved most, advertising art and teaching skiing. The year-round job paid 500 dollars a month, and the resort was still a working ranch. Between lessons, Burgess was called on to help with cow-hand chores, including castrating young bull calves.
The first winter tested everyone. Looking back in 2001, Burgess recalled that Angel Fire did not open for the Christmas holidays as planned: the lift in the village had major gearbox problems, and the long lift in the Back Basin was not quite finished. Skiers came anyway, so the crew put benches in the back of a Thiokol Sprite snowcat and hauled them up the mountain. Fewer than 1,000 skiers visited that first year, he recalled, and an adult lift ticket cost six dollars. The second year the area did not open at all. The story told later blamed a lack of snow, but Burgess remembered the real trouble as financial. He taught that winter at Red River and briefly at Big Mountain in Montana before returning to Angel Fire.
Back in the Moreno Valley, Burgess kept collecting jobs. He served over the years as ski school director, assistant ski school director, area manager and marketing director, and friends remembered a business card that read, in effect, Director of Marketing, Chief Bingo Caller, Assistant Plumber. He created Angel Fire's first logos, helped locate and erect the first lifts, and laid out some of the runs skiers still use today. When the LeBus family asked him to set up the resort's first satellite post office, he took Drawer A for himself. The resort got Drawer B. In 1966 he also started the Art Works, his graphic art and sign-making studio, whose hand-painted signs spread across the Enchanted Circle.
Burgess went on to help open Angel Fire's first Nordic ski area, co-found Ski New Mexico and the Angel Fire Chamber of Commerce, and teach skiing for more than 60 years before his induction into the New Mexico Ski Hall of Fame in 2009. He died on September 3, 2018, in Chandler, Arizona, at age 81. His longtime friend Robin May, himself an Angel Fire ski school director, put his legacy plainly: there is very little in Angel Fire, or in New Mexico skiing, that was not influenced by Bill. The lifts are faster now, but Angel Fire still runs on the runs, signs and spirit its first jack-of-all-trades left behind.