From the town of Uruapan, I visited Volcan Paricutin, at an elevation of 3170 meters ... "On February 20, 1943 farmer Dominic Pulido felt the ground tremble beneath his feet and watched in fright as Paricutin exploded out of a Mexican cornfield -- giving the modern world its first opportunity to witness the birth of a volcano. By the time the eruption ended in a blaze of violent activity in 1952, Paricutin had formed a cinder cone 424 meters tall. Lava flows covered twenty-five square kilometers, burying two villages. The only visible trace of the villages is the tower of the church of San Juan, still standing above a river of frozen lava." My adventure here was crossing a few kilometers of lava field to get to and climb the cone. This being central Mexico and my fifteenth volcano visit, the smell of pine forests in my nostrils was an unusual sensory stimuli, me being used to sulphur and other toxic flavors by this time.