Drive the Enchanted Circle south from Eagle Nest, through the wide Moreno Valley, and you come to the youngest town on the loop. Angel Fire did not grow up around a mine or a railroad. It began as a cattle ranch, and the ski resort at its heart was dreamed up at the family dinner table. The LeBus family came from Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1954, after buying the roughly 10,000-acre Monte Verde Ranch. Two years later Roy LeBus and his brother G.F. added the 15,000-acre Cieneguilla Tract, land once part of the vast Maxwell Land Grant, bringing their holdings to some 25,000 acres and making them one of the leading cattle operations in New Mexico.
Click to see more photos of Angel Fire Resort — its front mountain, back basin, and lifts
According to George LeBus, one of Roy's four children, the idea surfaced over a traditional Sunday supper. George remarked that the family should put a tow rope on their ranch so they would not have to drive so far to ski. His father replied that he was thinking on a slightly larger scale, left the table, and came back minutes later with detailed plans for a full-scale resort, complete with ski operations, a golf course, a country club, a fishing lake, an airport, and a day house. Both men agreed their ranch was the most beautiful land in New Mexico, and that it would make a fine resort destination.
Work started the next day. The family hired Albuquerque engineer Jim Woods, known for creating the Sandia Tram, as general manager, toured resorts across the West, and took advice from Ernie Blake of Taos Ski Valley and Don Carmichael of Red River Ski Area. In 1965 George LeBus and Woods walked the whole mountain ranch to lay out the trails, and over the next two years three chairlifts built by the Riblet company went up and the first slopes were groomed. A nine-hole golf course, Monte Verde Lake, and a day lodge followed in those first years, and the resort today dates its start to 1966.
The first winters were humbling. Ski instructor Bill Burgess, who arrived in 1966, recalled years later that the new area missed its planned Christmas opening because the village lift had major gearbox trouble and the long back-basin lift was not finished. Skiers came anyway, so the crew put benches in the back of a Thiokol snowcat and hauled them up the mountain. Fewer than 1,000 skiers showed up that first year, at six dollars for an adult lift ticket, and the second year the area did not open at all, a casualty, Burgess said, of financial trouble rather than lack of snow.
The LeBus family sold the resort in 1972, and the community kept growing around their dinner-table sketch. The Village of Angel Fire incorporated in 1986, and the resort, its base at 8,600 feet and its summit at 10,677 feet, grew into a four-season destination for skiing, golf, fishing, and mountain biking. So the next time you round the southern arc of the Enchanted Circle, remember that one of its brightest stops began not with a gold strike, but with a cattleman who thought bigger than a tow rope.