John & Susy Pint

     Mexico is hosting  the world’s largest fumarolic pipe park Text and photos by John Pint Nearly fifty years ago, Dr. John Wright came to Mexico to study pyroclastic flows: great “rivers” of incandescent volcanic ash that flowed across the landscape some 95,000 years ago when a huge, explosive volcanic eruption occurred not far from what is now Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city. Among the curiosities that Wright encountered during his two field trips in the 1970s to the woods around the little town of Tala, 30 kilometers west of Guadalajara, were rock formations that less scientific nature lovers have dubbed “fairy footstools.” Dr. John Wright still mapping volcanics in 2012, in South Australia’s Gawler Ranges. Though retired, Wright plans to revisit Tala’s extraordinary rock formations this October. Typically they look like nicely rounded tree stumps, perhaps a foot or two high. The casual observer first sees them as cut trees, but on closer observation discovers they a