TELLURIDE – When a crowd of 1,500 onlookers showed up for last year’s debut of the Telluride Heritage Fest – drawn in, no doubt, by the promised reenactment of Butch Cassidy’s infamous Telluride Bank holdup of more than a century before, the folks at the Telluride Historical Museum knew they had a winner. “We would have been really happy if just 300 people had showed up,” says museum spokesperson Beth Roberts.

This year the Heritage Fest – once again teaming up with the Wild West Fest for a weekend of good old-fashioned fun and games (tug-of-war, anyone?) has plans for “an even more vivid” reenactment of the holdup, “at high noon,” says Roberts, as well as horse-drawn carriage rides; mining, Ute Indian and ranching demos; pie-eating contests and the back-by-popular-demand Telluride-original, “Inaccurate Reenactments,” from SquidShow Theatre.

On Wednesday, June 16, the museum has organized a One Day Trip to the Ancestral Pueblo Indian Ruins of the Mesa Verde Region, complete with a visit to the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and Goodman Point excavation site.

Over the summer, the museum hosts tours of Schmid Ranch (a centennial farm) and Telluride’s Lone Tree Cemetery; hikes into the high country focusing on geologoy and historic flowers; and weekly fireside chats with local historians. On Sept. 10-12, they offer a Lead to Creede 4x4 Tour with local historian Rudy Davison at the helm of a three-day adventure through everything from some of the best, most spectacular ruins in Colorado to a night of Repertory Theatre in Creede. Visit www.telluridemuseum.org or call 970/728-3344, ext. 2, for details.