Angel Fire Resort was not designed on a drafting table. It was walked into existence, one trail at a time, by a rancher and his general manager climbing the mountain above the family ranch.
In 1965, George LeBus — whose family had bought the Cieneguilla Ranch in the Moreno Valley a decade earlier — set out with general manager Jim Woods to turn their mountain ranch into a ski area. The two men walked the slopes on foot, flagging the lines where ski runs would fall through the timber. It was ranch work applied to a new crop: reading terrain, water, and weather the way cattlemen always had, only now the harvest would be skiers.
What followed came fast. Crews cut trails and installed three Riblet chairlifts. Slopes were groomed, Monte Verde Lake took shape on the valley floor, and a nine-hole golf course spread across the meadows where cattle had grazed. When Angel Fire Resort opened for skiing in the winter of 1966–67, a working ranch had become New Mexico's newest ski town almost overnight.
The early years were lean. Sally LeBus later recalled that the family "poor-boyed it" — doing the work themselves, stretching every dollar. That first winter, the snow barely came, an anxious start long before snowmaking could rescue a dry season. The family simply endured, the way ranch families endure a bad year, and kept building.
The bet paid off. The first condominiums rose in 1971, and the resort kept growing from its ranch beginnings into the four-season community Angel Fire is today. But its origin story remains wonderfully local: no outside developer's master plan, just a Moreno Valley ranch family walking their own mountain in 1965, deciding where the trails ought to go. Every run a skier carves today still follows, in part, the lines those two men picked out on foot.