Angel Fire is famous first for its ski slopes, but the family that created the resort never planned a winter-only place. When Roy and George LeBus of Wichita Falls, Texas, bought the 9,000-acre Monte Verde Ranch in 1954, and added the 14,000-acre Cieneguilla Ranch from the Maxwell Land Grant Company in 1956, they were running cattle in the Moreno Valley. Within a decade, as the cattle business declined, Roy was imagining something else on that ranchland: a year-round resort with a ski area, a country club, and a golf course.
Click to see more photos of Monte Verde Lake — paddle boats, fishing, and paddleboarding on the lake
The building began in earnest in 1966, and it moved fast. George LeBus and general manager Jim Woods had walked the mountain in 1965 to lay out the first ski trails. After about 18 months of construction, those early trails were cut — but so was much more. A nine-hole golf course was complete, and Monte Verde Lake was ready for visitors. The ski area opened in the winter of 1966-67, yet from the very start Angel Fire offered a summer reason to come, too: fish the new lake in the morning, play golf under Wheeler Peak in the afternoon.
Those first years added the pieces that turned a development into a community. Alongside the lake and golf course, the LeBus crew built the lodge then called the Day Lodge and scraped out a dirt airstrip, so visitors could arrive by air as well as by mountain road. Word spread quickly through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Visitors needed places to stay, and the first condominiums were completed in 1971. The LeBus family sold the resort in 1972, but the pattern they had set — ranchland becoming a four-season town — was already fixed.
Monte Verde Lake shows that pattern best. The little lake built for the new resort is still there today, a spring-fed, high-mountain lake the resort measures at 28 acres. A mile-long loop trail circles it, boats and paddleboards go out from its boat house in summer, and anglers fish for the trout the resort stocks there. The golf course, meanwhile, grew from those first nine holes into the full 18-hole course visitors play today.
Stand on the shore of Monte Verde Lake on a summer evening and the whole Angel Fire story is in front of you. Behind you is ranch country that fed cattle herds for generations. Across the valley are the ski runs that made the town famous. And at your feet is the quiet proof that Angel Fire was never only about winter — from its first 18 months, this ranch valley was being built, lake, fairway, and runway at a time, into a resort town for every season.