Enchanted Circle

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.

Wednesday, October 28, 2026

One of the highest airports in the country is changing hands. Angel Fire Airport, sitting at 8,379.5 feet in the Moreno Valley just north of the village, with a single 8,900-foot asphalt runway, has long been owned by Colfax County. This month, county and village leaders took the formal steps to move it into the Village of Angel Fire's hands, a transfer village officials have been preparing as they plan the airport's next chapter.

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.

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.