Angel Fire History

By the autumn of 2005, the white chapel on the hill above Angel Fire was already thirty-four years old, and thousands of visitors a year were finding their way up U.S. Highway 64 to sit in its quiet. Then, on Veterans Day 2005, the memorial entered a new chapter. The site became Vietnam Veterans Memorial State Park, New Mexico's thirty-third state park, and the only state park in the United States dedicated solely to Vietnam veterans.

Did you know that one of the Moreno Valley's first cattlemen reached New Mexico by crossing an ocean to avoid a war, and then promptly enlisted in another army? Patrick Lyons was born in February 1831 at Kilriney, in County Kildare, Ireland, and was educated in the national schools of his native land. In 1854 he was drafted into the English army for the war between England and Russia. To avoid that service he came to America instead, landing in New York, where, strange to say, he immediately enlisted in the First Regiment of Mounted Rifles.

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.

Drive west from Angel Fire through Cimarron Canyon and you come to Cimarron, the old Santa Fe Trail town at the edge of the Moreno Valley. In the 1870s it was the center of Colfax County ranching and, for a time, home to one of the West's most talked-about cattlemen, Robert Clay Allison. He built a real ranch here, but it is his temper and his gun that people still remember.

Sunday, November 1, 2026

It is a quiet, rainy shoulder-season Sunday in Angel Fire, and the clocks fell back overnight as daylight saving time ended at 2:00 a.m. Sunrise came at 6:24 a.m. and sunset follows early at 5:04 p.m., giving the Moreno Valley just 10 hours and 40 minutes of daylight. With light rain at 41 degrees this morning, a high near 56, and showers and scattered thunderstorms expected into the evening, it is a good day for a slower question that visitors ask all year: how did a village in an old ranching valley come to be called Angel Fire?

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.

Stand anywhere in the Moreno Valley, look from Baldy Mountain down across the ranches and meadows toward Angel Fire, and you are looking across land that was once claimed as a single private estate. The Maxwell Land Grant was the largest land grant in United States history, and for decades nobody could say for certain how large it really was. Was it about 97,424 acres, or was it 1,714,765 acres? That question took a patent, a lawsuit, and the United States Supreme Court to answer.

Elizabethtown had already lived several lives by the autumn of 1903. Born in the gold rush of 1866 on the west slope of Baldy Mountain, it became New Mexico's first incorporated town and, in 1870, the first seat of newly formed Colfax County. When the easy gold gave out, its population fell from thousands to about one hundred by 1872, and the county seat moved to Cimarron. Yet E-Town, as its residents called it, hung on and revived somewhat when the railroad passed nearby, making mining feasible once again.

When the Vietnam Veterans Peace and Brotherhood Chapel was dedicated above the Moreno Valley in 1971, it stood nearly alone on its hill — a soaring white chapel built by Dr. Victor and Jeanne Westphall to honor their son David and the Marines lost with him. Did you know that chapel was only the beginning? Over the next half century the memorial grew, piece by piece, into one of the most complete places of healing for Vietnam veterans anywhere in the country, and one of its most beloved additions arrived by way of a battlefield in the Mekong Delta.

The most famous hotel in the Cimarron country was built by a French chef who had cooked for Abraham Lincoln. Henri Lambert's road from the White House kitchen to the Santa Fe Trail runs straight through the Moreno Valley.

Lambert was born in France on October 28, 1838, and learned his trade in the port city of Le Havre. Emigrating to America, his skill carried him to an extraordinary post: chef to President Abraham Lincoln. His service ended in sorrow — Lambert was relieved of his duties on April 14, 1865, the very day Lincoln was assassinated.