Moreno Valley

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.

On a hill above Angel Fire, a white chapel rises out of the grass like a pair of wings. It is one of the most moving sights in the Moreno Valley, and it began with a family's grief.

Marine First Lieutenant Victor David Westphall III was killed in action near Con Thien, Vietnam, on May 22, 1968. Back home in New Mexico, his parents, Victor and Jeanne Westphall, decided to turn their loss into a place of peace. Using the money from their son's life insurance policy, they began building a chapel on the hill above the valley that same summer.

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.