Angel Fire History

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?

On the night of October 27, 1870, a crowd of miners in Elizabethtown burned the Maxwell Land Grant Company's office to the ground. It was the opening shot of the Colfax County War, and it happened just up the Moreno Valley from today's Angel Fire.

Before the land grants, before the gold camps and the cattle ranches, the Moreno Valley belonged to the Moache Ute and the Jicarilla Apache. Their era here lasted centuries, and its ending set the stage for everything that followed.

Angel Fire is a young town with an old landscape. The Moreno Valley around it has been hunted, farmed, mined, and ranched for centuries, but the Village of Angel Fire itself only came into legal existence forty years ago, on July 1, 1986.

Every acre of Eagle Nest Lake was once somebody's farm, and no one fought harder to keep hers than Mary Gallagher. Her nine-year stand against the dam is one of the Moreno Valley's great stories of grit.

Mary was a widow farming valley land her husband John had bought with gold earned in the 1870s Elizabethtown boom. The Gallaghers had built a working farm from almost nothing, digging irrigation canals from Willow Creek and Cieneguilla Creek to water their fields. It was good land, hard won, and Mary intended to keep it.

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.

Every ranch, mine, and ski run in the Angel Fire country sits on ground once controlled by a single land grant — and, for a time, by a single man. The story of the Maxwell Land Grant shaped the Moreno Valley as surely as its mountains did.

Elizabethtown, the Moreno Valley's great gold boomtown, started with a mistake. In October 1866, a party sent out from Fort Union was working a copper prospect on Baldy Mountain when they panned the gravels of Willow Creek — and found gold instead.

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.

Did you know that one of the Moreno Valley's most forward-looking ranchers started out as a schoolteacher? John W. Turner arrived in the valley above Elizabethtown in 1874, moving to this high mountain country for the benefit of his wife's health. Elizabethtown was still a gold town then, and Turner tried the two trades the valley offered a newcomer: he taught school for one winter, then spent four years mining.