Find Biking Heaven in Angel Fire

Blair is so hooked on swooping downhill and launching jumps that she moved from Austin, Texas, to Angel Fire in February. “I got a taste for it and just fell in love,” she says. But Blair’s first rides here, just a month or so after she started mountain biking, taught her some harsh lessons, learned from tumbles into the dirt rather than gently applied advice. Not everyone wants to come home from vacation bruised and bloodied, so the bike park has spent several summers building up options. Chipmunk is just one of them.

After a two-year effort to build new trails and terrain for beginners and last summer’s launch of the Learn to Ride Program, Angel Fire Resort is clearly ground for more than gnarly summer mountain biking—and winter skiing, of course. The town, nestled in the Moreno Valley, has also increased the reasons to linger and learn more about the place.

Located along the Enchanted Circle Scenic Byway that rings Wheeler Peak, the tiny community of 1,200 has diversified its summertime offerings with a popular concert series, farmers’ market, a Fourth of July drone show, and nighttime stargazing events added to paddleboard and pedal-boat outings at Monte Verde Lake. Even the dining scene is expanding. For locals who love the quiet that settles throughout Angel Fire, there’s a common philosophy built around having a good time. Whether they’re running a restaurant or guiding hikers or bikers, they say, it never feels like work. They’re just having fun.

ANGEL FIRE RESORT HAS DEVELOPED A FUNNY split perception—the family-friendly winter terrain of wide intermediate runs and the state’s only night skiing transforms in summer to a renowned bike park with big drops, long ramps, and other challenges to test expert riders. Sit at the base area and train your eyes uphill, and it won’t take more than a few minutes to see bikers showcasing aerial skills. But the trouble, Blair says, is that visitors “see people launching off ramps 20 feet into the air, and they think that’s mountain biking. That’s not all mountain biking.”

I follow Blair downhill on an older green trail, pop out at a merge with Duchess, a blue trail—like skiing, bike trails are marked with green circles for easiest, blue squares for intermediate, and black diamonds for most difficult—and catch up with bike school manager Sebastián Cuadra. He asks what I think of the green terrain above, from a beginner’s perspective. Although the trail is rated as easy, I admit that even those supposedly entry-level turns twisting through the trees would probably be intimidating for a first-timer. It’s a point he understands all too well.

As an instructor at the bike park since 2017, Cuadra led one lesson after another that ended in a truck ride down the hill after kids got too tired or beginners were overwhelmed by the stacks of banked corners (called berms) and little jump features to roll over. So the resort created even easier terrain that helps beginners get started.

“We have a dedicated clientele of good riders, and they’re coming no matter what,” Cuadra says. “But we want more people to be like, ‘Okay, we can mountain bike too—it’s not just for pros.’ ”

We bike to the spot built just last year to ease that entry. The same hill that serves beginning skiers is now coiled with a string of eight low-angle turns and a special surface to keep down the ruts and rocks. Now, instructors use this sunny meadow as an introduction to mountain biking, discussing the anatomy of a corner and basics like braking and shifting on this new trail, Mac and Cheese, and its tree-lined companion, Spicy Mac. A four-minute surface-lift ride hauls bikers to the top, and from there, they can see everything they’re signing up to tackle.

This isn’t Angel Fire Resort’s first attempt at opening a beginner trail and recruiting new riders, Cuadra says. Although the last one fizzled, he thinks this time the bike industry’s growth is ready for it. The persistent interest in outdoor activities since the pandemic makes for a bigger audience. Those new riders will also be met with the resort’s highly certified staff, a different approach to teaching, and a range of purpose-built terrain that includes kid-friendly runs.

Bikers aren’t the only ones getting rides uphill, as hikers can also enjoy the scenic tour on a two-mile chairlift that carries them up 2,000 feet in elevation. The resort also runs a boathouse at Monte Verde Lake, where a routine afternoon storm swirls the water as families snap kids into life jackets, then paddle around the lake. Anglers in broad-brimmed hats cast from a grassy shore. Hikers meander a one-mile path that loops around the water, just one of at least 15 miles of trails starting near town.

The list of lakeside amusements grew last year to include stargazing after Mike Hawkins, Angel Fire Resort marketing manager, raised his hand to host these increasingly popular monthly events.

“You almost always gain an audience if you bring a telescope out into a public place,” he says. He landed at the Monte Verde Lake boathouse, in part, because the boathouse manager trusts him to turn off the breakers to allow for a sky view with limited light pollution. On summer Fridays around the quarter moon, he breaks out his astronomy and astral photography skills, and trains a telescope at the sky for an audience. They’ll peer at that slice of moon, because it’s a kid pleaser, but he’ll look out for other targets too.

“If there are any planets,” he says, “those are the jewels.”

FROM THE WINDOW OF THE SMOKE RINGS BBQ food truck in Frontier Park, Jennifer and Grant Gergen take orders and hand out sandwiches made with 12-hour smoked brisket and pulled pork alongside potato salad, beans, or corn bread salad.

Through the window, Jennifer also watches the weather change on the mountains, the occasional blip of a skier or a biker, and concertgoers who pop up regularly for Friday evening shows. It beats the view from their corporate office, she says.

The Gergens, who had vacationed in New Mexico for 30 years before buying a house near Angel Fire, sold their Texas-based business a year ago and started the food truck. Grant recalls Jennifer pitching the idea after she noticed the absence of barbecue in town. “You could bring your smoker up here and see what you could do,” Grant recalls her suggesting.

Just a day after last summer’s test run with resort staff, their trailer was parked at Frontier Park and the smoker fired up for the last few weekends of the Cool Summer Nights concert series. As of June, they were looking forward to the summer RV crowd, who left last fall saying, “We hope you’re here next year.”

As part of a trio of food trucks at the park, their hours line up with events such as the summer concerts and the Sunday farmers’ market, where vendors sell Rocky Ford melons, organic herbs from Mora, Palisade peaches, local honey, fresh-baked bread, and fire-roasted chiles. Grant looks forward to the arrival of sweet corn at the market so he can smoke it, swapping with a farmer who keeps urging him to smoke beef ribs.

“We just try to keep it simple,” Grant says. “And homemade,” Jennifer adds.

It’s fun, he says, and if it ever stops being fun, they’ll quit. “We think it’s working,” Grant says. “People keep coming back.”

Hannah Mercek and Phil Master, who run Taty at the Bump coffee shop, have a similar approach. The two stumbled into Angel Fire in 2016 totally broke and sleeping on a friend’s couch. “We just fell in love with the valley,” Mercek tells me over a vanilla blueberry latte.

After working at other local restaurants, they decided to open Taty Café in 2022. They moved to the former Bump Coffee location last year, merging branding to make the current name. As staff brew espresso and pour oat milk and almond milk for bottled mochas for the farmers’ market, Mercek says she built the menu to offer lighter, healthier fare, packable enough to be dropped into a backpack.

The gains still startle Master. “Yesterday, I was washing dishes for somebody else, and now I’ve got my own pink shirt,” he jokes, tugging at the merch Mercek printed with their new logo. They’ve also finally had a moment to sit on the front porch of the ranch-style home they bought in November. They affectionately refer to the three-bedroom place with grand views and a yard for the dogs as “the house that lattes and avocado toast built.” (For what it’s worth, Taty at the Bump serves some seriously robust avocado toast.)

LONGTIME HUNTING GUIDE and fourth-generation rancher Josh Salazar steps away from a morning he’d otherwise have spent shearing sheep to sit for a minute at a shady picnic table and talk. Lots of people come to Angel Fire to spend a few days in the woods, but Salazar is in those mountains so often that he knows the elks’ patterns and habits. He has tracked some bulls and watched them grow for several years.

The trophy heads hanging in the Lodge at Angel Fire Resort are the closest most guests will come to the resident herds, but they’re a testament to the local woods’ robust wildlife. Salazar grew up hunting as a way of spending time with his dad, then gradually began working for a number of outfitters.

The season begins with scouting in July and August and runs through the last lower-elevation hunts in January. In the summer, he tracks where elk spend their days bedded down and which water sources they’re frequenting. When I ask what he looks for, Salazar shrugs. But minutes later, he circles back: It’s not so much knowing what to look for as knowing where to look.

Salazar spends spring and early summer searching for shed antlers. Features on their pedicles, the base where antlers attach to the skull, are as unique as a fingerprint, so he can track individual elk dropping bigger and bigger antlers each year. “It’s pretty cool to get out there and see that bull made it through another year,” he says.

What he enjoys teaching newcomers to the sport is how to read those patterns and to appreciate the mountains. “You’ve got to do it for the right reasons,” he says. “You’ve got to love it, enjoy it, and respect it, and respect the land and the animals. Because, like I say, this is their home.”

That’s a good axiom for Angel Fire too. Following it through the seasons with the fresh eyes of a beginner is a chance to appreciate the qualities that give the town a timeless appeal, as well as the changes that make it worth another look—even if you think you already know what you’ll see.

Read more: Gear up for the rides of your life on these trails.