JANUARY 21 2005

STEAMS LIKE OLD TIMES: When the Georgetown Loop reopens this Memorial Day, two former Colorado and Southern engines will do the looping.

CHS and Railstar Corporation, the historic line’s new operator, announced the acquisition of C&S Engine 9 and C&S Engine 74/30, along with about a dozen other pieces of rolling stock. Negotiations are pending on three additional steam engines.

CHS and Railstar will discuss the new acquisitions and introduce the railroad's new management team at an open house Monday, January 24 from 6-8 p.m. at the Georgetown Community Center (corner of Argentine and 6th Street). In attendance: Ron Trottier, general manager of Railstar Corporation; Peter Gores, general manager of the Georgetown Loop for Railstar Corporation; Georgianna Contiguglia, president of the Colorado Historical Society; and Phillip Karsh, chairman of the Colorado Historical Society’s board of directors.

ANTIQUITIES AT 100: Of the 150 or so sessions listed for the 2005 American Association of Museums Conference and Expo in Indianapolis, we were most intrigued by this one: 100 Years of the Antiquities Act, moderated by NPS chief curator Ann Hitchcock. Inspired in part by the discoveries at Mesa Verde and intended to preserve archaeological sites, the law in practice granted presidents a potent tool for unilateral land set-asides. It was invoked at the Grand Canyon, Grand Tetons, Glacier Bay, and elsewhere, including a recent (and highly controversial) application by Bill Clinton in creating Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Read the Park Service’s short history of the law, or this longer treatment by historian Ronald Lee.

FOUL PLAY: A century of mining poisoned Leadville’s soils and water — but the place got really toxic in the late 1980s, when the EPA showed up and tried to clean things up. Or so says author Gillian Klucas in Leadville: The Struggle to Revive an American Town, published last month by Shearwater Books. She speaks and signs in Denver at the Tattered Cover LoDo next Tuesday, January 25, at 7:30 p.m.