Stand anywhere in Angel Fire today and you are standing on ranch land. Before the ski runs, the golf course, and the condominiums, the Moreno Valley was a working landscape of cattle, timber, and hay meadows, and few purchases shaped its future more than the one Roy and George LeBus made in 1954.
That year, the LeBus family bought the Cieneguilla Ranch from the Maxwell Land Grant Company: some 15,000 acres in the southern Moreno Valley, on ground that now lies within present-day Angel Fire. The family ran cattle on the valley floor and logged the surrounding slopes, joining a ranching tradition that stretched back generations in southwest Colfax County, where private homesteads and ranches had been carved out of the old land grants.
The valley's human story runs far deeper than any deed. The Moreno Valley was the ancestral home of the Moache Ute and the Jicarilla Apache, who lived and hunted along the eastern slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains long before Spanish settlers arrived in the 1700s. Mexican settlers followed under the land grants, farming and ranching the high valley, and their descendants were still working the land when Anglo homesteaders and cattle outfits arrived in the late 1800s.
Ranching defined the valley's economy for a century. Hay cut from irrigated meadows fed herds through winters at elevations above 8,000 feet, and cattle moved between the valley floor and the timbered hillsides with the seasons. It was a hard, quiet living, and the families who made it — the LeBuses among them — knew every creek and fence line of the valley they worked.
The Cieneguilla purchase also turned out to be the seed of something none of the old ranchers could have pictured. A decade after buying the ranch, the LeBus family began laying out ski trails on the mountain above their cattle country, and the ranching valley slowly became the resort community of Angel Fire. But the cattle came first, and the valley's wide meadows still carry the shape of the ranching era that made everything else possible.