It's a pile of mining waste. Want to go skiing on it?

Typically mining tailing piles are not destinations to see.

They're usually filled with heavy metals and lots of other pollutants, but this pile is mostly inert sand...and it's an off-season ski slop.

That's pretty cool. 

The giant chainmail box that stops a house dissolving

Coincidentally, I'm going to be in Helensburgh, Scotland in about a month and a week (from when this posts on 4/25/22, anyway). My wife and I are hiking the John Muir Way, a 134-mile path from west to east across the narrow 'waist' of Scotland. Maybe I'll check out the house from the video.

I find myself in an odd little focus on conservation videos of late. In the above video, Tom Scott looks at the efforts to 'dry' out a cement house from from 1902 designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mackintosh's design used Portland cement for the outside, and while it's a fascinating house, it's made from a material that is absolutely not appropriate for the damp Scottish environment. 

In trying to dry out the house, they have to dry it slowly. So they have built a giant, roofed box over the house and made the walls from chainmail which keeps raindrops off the house but allows the water vapor to leave and the air and bees to come through for the 'fifteen years it'll take to dry out and repair" the house. Plus they've put in walkways and gantries that turn the house into a tourist attraction. Brilliant plan there, National Trust.

Maybe I'll extend my walk a little bit.