Every resort has a founding meeting. Angel Fire's was a Sunday dinner, and the minutes were never written down — but the LeBus family remembered exactly how it went.
The family had run cattle in the Moreno Valley since buying the Cieneguilla Ranch in 1954, and they liked to ski. The trouble was getting to it: the nearest skiing meant a drive out of the valley. George LeBus raised the obvious fix at the dinner table — why not put up a tow rope on the ranch, so the family would not have to drive so far to ski?
His father Roy heard something bigger. Roy left the table and returned a few minutes later with detailed plans — not for a tow rope, but for a full resort: ski operations, a golf course, a country club, a fishing lake, an airport, a day house. The family ranch, in Roy's vision, was about to become a destination.
Vision became work. The family hired engineer Jim Woods, creator of the Sandia Peak Tramway, to help design the mountain. They toured the great western resorts to learn how it was done, and they worked with the men who had built New Mexico skiing — Ernie Blake of Taos and Don Carmichael of Red River — with Vail, Colorado as the model of what a modern ski resort could be. The money behind it all was mostly the family's own, earned the slow way: from cattle.
Angel Fire opened in the winter of 1967, a year after the walking and trail-cutting began. Think of it the next time you ride the lift: one of New Mexico's great resorts exists because a rancher went to Sunday dinner with a small idea, and his father came back to the table with a much bigger one.