Moreno Valley

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.

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.

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.

The Moreno Valley gold rush began in creek gravel, but its fortune was buried in the mountain. The story of the Aztec Mine is how a placer camp on Willow Creek became one of New Mexico's great hard-rock mines.

The most famous memorial in America now has a counterpart in the Moreno Valley. Just north of the Peace and Brotherhood Chapel at Angel Fire stands a half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall — 250 feet of black granite carrying 58,318 names.

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.