The story of the Maloofs in America starts in another Las Vegas, a dusty, heartbreak of a town in New Mexico two hours northeast of Albuquerque. George Maloof Sr. was the son of Lebanese immigrants who ran a general store there, a place that supplied local ranchers with the necessities of life. The family moved to Albuquerque to focus on beer distribution just before George Sr. went off to the University of Colorado. He had to hurry home to take over the business after his father suffered a heart attack.
In a relatively poor state like New Mexico, being a beer distributor makes you a very important person, particularly if your brand has 50 percent market share, which Coors did in its heyday there. So when one of Albuquerque’s major banks was ailing in 1976, George Sr., a member of its board, was asked to take over. ”My dad got puffed up and flattered and he came home and told my mom, You know, such-and-such wants me to be the chairman of the board,” Joe said. ”And my mom looked at him — and this was the statement that probably saved us — and she saPOSTID: ‘Are you crazy? Why do you want to work so hard for someone else? Why don’t you just buy it?”’
Colleen’s intervention would be worth $140 million (the amount in stock the bank was sold for in 1993) and underwrite the dreams of the entire Maloof family.
The four bachelor Maloof brothers, owners of a Las Vegas casino, the Sacramento Kings and an “everyday mardi gras of cleavage, fast cars and front-row seats.”
Less than four years ago, Congress paid $101 million to buy an 89,000-acre ranch in northern New Mexico of such grandeur and scientific richness it’s been called the Yellowstone of the Southwest. The nation’s backpacking cognoscenti laced up their hiking boots in anticipation. Here, finally, was the chance to tramp across a landscape so iconic of the American West that it appeared for years in Marlboro Man ads and on Stetson hatboxes. 
(When a few “sneak peek” hikes were announced in September 2000, 50,000 people telephoned in one day to snare the 1,500 spots.) But the managers also needed time to digest the mandate Congress had handed them. The preserve is “an experiment in land management” that is run neither by the Forest Service nor the National Park Service but by a trust that is governed by presidential appointees. Valles Caldera is to remain a working ranch while also protecting the environment and accommodating hikers, hunters and other users. As if that wasn’t challenging enough, Congress asked the preserve to try to become financially self-sufficient by 2015, whether by charging fees for cattle grazing and recreation or perhaps even permitting some logging. It is a complex, at times contradictory charge and one that makes Valles Caldera a good symbol of the many issues the nation’s public lands grapple with today….
Some of the West’s great vistas thrust themselves on you with a beauty that is almost oppressive. Valles Caldera is not one of these places. Beyond the windshield, steamship clouds dragged their shadows across Valle Grande, a treeless, harvest-colored valley that ran to a horizon of ponderosa and green peaks. A bull elk lounged in the valley with his harem, his chandelier of a rack rising above the grama grass. This is not the awe-demanding West of Albert Bierstadt but the welcoming West of an Aaron Copland score – a big-hearted landscape, heroic, promising, completely American. Seeing it, you realize that you know Valles Caldera from billboards and ads and untold westerns. You feel at home. 
